“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.

There is many a white man less fortunate and less well equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient – in America.

White has always been an exclusive definition. I think one of the challenges for white people is to figure out how to have a more inclusive picture of who their families are, of who they are.

I would never let a white boy beat me. You can print that. I would never lose to a white person.

What is the problem with the advertising industry is they’re still, for me, what I call in Africa is the colonial mind of white men, because the black person or the other colour is out of the line. They’re not good for this sort of purpose.

I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term ‘white trash,’ by which they meant poor southerners who didn’t go to Harvard. I’m not sure why that makes them trash.

When it comes to making decisions, I will come down on the side of Nebraska every time. If I have to choose between the White House and the farmhouse, I choose the farmhouse.

For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.

After all the black man has been through in this world, he can still often reach levels of spirituality the most pampered white man cannot touch. Maybe what he’s been through is the reason why.