So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

My eyes close. I am here and not here. A waking nap? A flight to the end of the galaxy and perhaps a couple of billion light-years beyond?

Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.

I'm not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.

Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.