“Those books of mine that are remunerative – I’m not talking about poetry here – take years to write, and I am never sure they’ll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.”

I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.

I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.

And an equation is the same whether it’s written in red or green ink.

Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.

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

It is exciting to write about the present once one gets beyond the trivia of the moment. As a time to live in, as a time to think about, the present is intriguing.

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.

I simply seem to drift. But I sort of allow the drift, because it has a kind of check – it forces me to work harder at what I’m interested in.

Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?

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 tend to follow a scattershot approach to reading a lot of very diverse subjects interest me, and I’m quite happy to read stuff on any of them.

I don’t think people give Indian society enough credit. We may not like to talk much about things but we do, basically, want to live and let live.

Put your backbone where your wishbone is.

Put out the good and keep the bad – don’t believe all you read in the Bible.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

If emotional pain or problems have cropped up in your life, you must insist on getting closure. Closure means you don’t carry the problem or the pain. You address the issue, then you slam shut the book and put it away.

It hurts that I was just one page in the book of your life. But what hurts more is knowing you’ll revise that chapter someday, and you’ll erase me completely.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.