“If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.”

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

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

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.

I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

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

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

It is important not to trust people too much.

Writing has to support itself.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

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.

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

All cultures have been mingled forever.

There is false humility and genuine humility and between them, there is a desire of the practitioner to become humble.

Those who desire to remain intoxicated by Reality do not require artificial intoxicants. Indulging in false things will only increase falsity, for every direction is indeed infinite.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

Renunciation means death of false ego.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

The difference between true and false repentance lies in this: the man who truly repents cries out against his heart; but the other, as Eve, against the serpent, or something else.

Like the juggler, deceiving by his tricks, one is deluded by egotism, falsehood and illusion.

Admire the diamond that can bear the hits of a hammer. Many deceptive preachers, when critically examined, turn out to be false.