It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

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

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

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

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.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.