The writer is the midwife of understanding.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it.

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

Your enemies are always manufactured to suit your purpose, right? How can you have a good enemy? You have to have an utterly evil enemy - and then the evilness has to progress.

The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love.

When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.

India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition.

The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is not a better place.

If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.

Truly, there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really....

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!