“I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.”

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.

You can write about anything for children as long as you’ve got humour.

Boys think girls are like books, If the cover doesn’t catch their eye they won’t bother to read what’s inside.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.

Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.