I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive.

Be a poet and write your own unique poetry of life.

Your worth cannot be determined by the value others place on you it can only be determined by what you know to be true about yourself

When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.

That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.

I’ve always thought that each person invented himself… that we are each a figment of our own imagination. And some people have a greater ability to imagine than others.

I don’t fear failure. I only fear the slowing up of the engine inside of me which is saying, ‘Keep going, someone must be on top, why not you?

He who hears this name [God] from a Jew must inform the authorities, or else throw sow dung at him when he sees him and chase him away.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

Among the things that you, and you alone, are the absolute and final judge of is whether or not you are a success.

As of now, Virat Kohli is the greatest batsman of the world