When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them.

If you rest you rust.

Sena under the leadership of Uddhav Thackeray has failed. It is a party on the decline, and that decline started the day Maharashtra Navnirman Sena was formed.

He cares about the people involved, but I don't think he's a big football fan.

Spirituality doesn’t exist on another level different from ordinary life.

I believe - deeply and profoundly - that speculation is a loser's game.

You insisted on thinking of them as angels, even if they were fallen angels.

I am like the little rock n' roll backseat driver.

Before I knew how to do anything, I was figuring out how to be in a band.

You must learn to follow privately the Lord's bidding: not to speak empty words, not to adorn yourself, always to obey authority, not to look at a woman with desire, not to be angry and much else.