When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why did success pass me by?

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

I can't have composite characters. I can't attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

The day your heart fills only with fear and insecurities, everything you see becomes the ghost that you were always scared of.

It isn't you, ' he says, as though you're to be comforted by the irrelevant role you play in your own life.

Consistency is the defense of a small mind

Terrorist', noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Life's not all beer and skittles

Virginity is not honored simply because it is virginity, but because it is consecrated of God.

One never comes into embarrassment, if one is ready to balance. To ask oneself never in embarrassment, what have you in these decades made.

By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.

I would have been miserable in college. I always hated school.