I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

Music is only love looking for words.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

My mom, Irmelin, taught me the value of life. Her own life was saved by my grandmother during World War II.

To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.

We don't have to become big scholars, we don't have to become big supermen. We simply have to become a humble servant of Lord Krishna.

Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution

One of the things I have become aware of through the years is how much I love the people I write about.

Writing is like a rollercoaster ride for me, an adventure. I love exploring the world through playing people who are absolutely nothing like me.

It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

If some of my judgments were wrong - and some were wrong - they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the nation.

Forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that.

I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent.