“We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.”

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

My first novel, ‘The Tiger’s Daughter,’ embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man’s land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn’t regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn’t conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

But, Christ, there’s a difference between exotic and foreign, isn’t there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably wed picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns.

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted… I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded.

In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement.

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money.

Mother Teresas detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless.

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns.

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

Now, however, an attack may come without warning from an unknown enemy, to achieve unclear motives.

Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots the decadence that controls our culture, the profit motive that controls our culture.

To be in theater you have to be a kind of psychologist, for you’re always trying to understand character and motives.

One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. and sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that is laid upon me, let the breath of life fail me.

The good opinion of our fellow men is the strongest, though not the purest motive to virtue.

The true motives of our actions, like the real pipes of an organ, are usually concealed; but the gilded and hollow pretext is pompously placed in the front for show.

One desire has been the ruling passion of my life.