“I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.”

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.

Sportsmen just do what they do. I’m not trying to be a role model. If there’s any inspiration people can take from me, take as much as you can – from my good and my bad.

You pay to have a good time, you don’t always want to pay to be schooled or sad or reminded how bad you got it. To me a movie theater ain’t always the place for that.

Good boys are nice – don’t go for the bad ones!

I’m very realistic. I know my boundaries – I know what I’m good at and what I’m not good at.

I mean, there’ll always be room for big productions and everything but it’s good to see the other side.

If you have a script that’s not great, if you have a great director, you can make a great movie, but if you have a great script with a director who’s not good, never are you going to have a good movie.

To the honey I said, You don’t know what it is to be made of so much goodness, yet in a hollow be so hidden.

I vote Labour and can’t begin to acknowledge anything good that comes from a Tory.