“Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.”

The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.

Man without life companion is either god or beast.

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

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I’m not. I’m just obsessed with my work.

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.

The sky is on fire I am, too cigarette burns on my faded tattoo.

We burn incandescent memories lungs aching with washed-out oxygen as if we weren’t to meet again.

His love set her on fire and she loved the way it burned.

Dry throat on the days I’d rather just watch the candle burn.

The lava that erupts from the volcanoes has been reoccurring for far too long and even tho I’ve been warned that my lava can burn others I can’t help but erupt at the possibility that someone will want to burn for me.

Don’t be a match to someone else’s candle because, in the end, you’ll both burn out.

Her eyes sparkled with diamonds of hope and burned with fires of raw passion.

If he was the flame then I was the moth and I would burn with a smile on my face.