I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

You get your inspiration - suggestions - wherever you have to, even from your mother.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

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 am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.

Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person's power. Be just to yourself.

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