“Those books of mine that are remunerative – I’m not talking about poetry here – take years to write, and I am never sure they’ll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.”

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.

Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?

That Book (the BIBLE) accounts for the supremacy of England

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Religion and faith are very personal matters. So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the Constitution of India.

You can predict a persons future and divine his bank balance if you know two things: the books he reads, the people he associates with.

Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

No book can teach you about yourself, no psychologist, none of the professors or philosophers. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be.

Life is too short to read a bad book.