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 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.

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.

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.

Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.

All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh.

I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.

Yes, I'm still going to misbehave!

"You were not born to be a second-hander." Howard Roark to Gail Wynand in "The Fountainhead"

For most people on the planet, consciousness can be equated with thought. They haven't experienced what it means to be conscious without thought, or they have only for very brief instants.

You never date someone's ex-boyfriend. Period. That's not even the unspoken rule - that's the spoken rule.

Many girls have not the advantage I have and I [am] very very glad that satan has not geven me boils and many other Misfortunes.

I love making comedy. I never stopped loving it. I will continue to love it and I can't believe that I get to do it.

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.