India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.

It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.

A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.

I was looking for the key for years But the door was always open

The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave

You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.

You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.

Let us live while we are alive!

If Mark Twain had had Twitter, he would have been amazing at it. But he probably wouldn't have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn.

library is a beautiful old thing

Folly and desperation are ofttimes hard to tell apart.

Niceness is the psychological armor of the people-pleaser.

When I joined Small Faces, we occasionally would bump into The Who. And Keith Moon and I became firm pals.

History is an orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.

I think if you're feeling great about where you are, everything that led up to it had to be terrific.

It’s a fair-sized job to write a book that people can be bothered just to read; when they begin to steal copies, you are really getting some place.