“You can talk good ideas out of existence.”

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.

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.

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don’t know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.

An old couple makes you realize that true love still exists.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.

The important thing in life is not how much one earns, but how much existence one does not waste.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.

A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.