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

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.

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?

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.

Aiming for a greater level of success should never be for the purpose of making others look inferior to you.

If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.

Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use.

Nothing does more to activate Christian divisions than talk about Christian unity.

While there's capitalism, there'll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.

The fame and the money and all that stuff that comes along with it is all great, but that's not the sole purpose of why I make music.

I always go back and do theater. I love it. It keeps an actor improving in a way, it sort of keeps your craft alive, if that makes sense.

Wait. Look. Notice. If you keep those three words in mind, you just might survive the next few days.

Child. That was a terrible thing to say to anyone who was almost thirteen.