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 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.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.