I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?

India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.

What a sense of possession, of confidence, it gave one to have pockets, to shove one's fists into them, as if in simply owning pockets one owned riches, owned independence.

My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.

...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.

When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.

They say what doesn't kill u makes u stronger.. but truth is sometimes it does kill u, it kills a part of u then it makes u stronger.

It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

Sending armies to McClellan is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard, not half of them get there.

You're so ashamed of your past; drop it! You're so proud of your past; drop it!

I spent my teenage years in Paris when my dad was stationed there, and I'd look at women in their forties and think, 'That's the age I want to be.'

For, once begun, Your task is easy; half the work is done.

The same way that mid century modern architecture was in the 50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines.

American teachers have one indisputable advantage over foreign ones; they understand the American temperament and can judge its unevenness, its lights and its shadows.

War knows no law except that of might.

I saw the tracks of angels in the earth: the beauty of heaven walking by itself on the world.