I don't want to be cremated, I want to be buried. I don't believe in wasting wood and I feel that one should give back to the earth.

But big people’s illnesses are always made to sound big. The simple shutting and opening of the royal arse-hole was made to sound as if the world was coming to an end.

I did subscribe to the freedom movement and I was much closer to the Congress than to the Akali party. It is a communal party.

I've had very little sex. I like my Scotch, but I've never been drunk.

I discovered that a diplomat's life is largely entertaining and meeting people. At the end of the day there's nothing. So I gave up.

I have never, in 50 years, ever missed a deadline [as a journalist].

I am not a serious person. I don't claim any profundity for any of my writing.

I was unhappy with the jobs I did after law. I got into the diplomatic service. There again I had really little to do.

I turned to the Partition experiences, which were churning in my mind. Then came my first novel Train to Pakistan.

I am prolific. Any rubbish I write gets published, so books keep churning out.

I was never a cardholder. But I was leftist in the sense that I voted communist.

Friends meddle with my plan of work. I resent people dropping in for a chat.

[Sex] is of real interest to every human being and so why gloss over it, and it's fun, it's interesting, it has so many dimensions.

Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion.

No one has invented a condom for the pen yet. My pen is still sexy.

I am alone, but never lonely. You have always books around you.

When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.

I haven't any close friends. Friendship needs time to interact, sit down, gossip. I don't have that time.

I think the sense of belonging does give you a certain amount of mental satisfaction.