I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!

There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.

Little children are all writers.

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.

The sun was shut up in a cold bottle.

This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn't India. Bombay is an own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there.

We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites And private hates with our defence of Heaven.

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.

Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.

Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.

I never got to see the '27 Yankees. Everyone says that was the greatest team ever. But I think it would've been a great series if we'd have had the chance to play them.

Help one another: this is what Jesus teaches us and this what I am doing, and doing with all my heart.

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.