We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

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.

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

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.