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

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.

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.

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest.

I once asked my oldest daughter [Julia Marie] if she thought about changing her name in school and she said, “No, I’m a Pacino. That’s my name.”

I can see [ talent or curiosity for acting] in my oldest daughter [Julia Marie Pacino]. I don’t know how long she’ll run away from it, but it’s there in her.

I hope our daughters are born with so much fire in their souls, they could put volcanoes and stars to shame.

Teach your daughters their battle cries are needed far more than their silence and hear them deafen the world with their fearlessness.

Tell your daughters how you love your body. Tell them how they must love theirs.

We already had an adopted daughter, 10-year-old Courtney, from my previous marriage.

They wrapped her up like a baby burrito to show to Mom. Here were a mother and her daughter and I love them both so much.