It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.