Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

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.