Quote collection
61 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off."
"In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke."
"In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I've remained an Indian."
"Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing."
"I simply seem to drift. But I sort of allow the drift, because it has a kind of check - it forces me to work harder at what I'm interested in."
"I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me."
"Of course, the greater one's need, the greater one's propensity to be mesmerized."
"I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature."
"You can talk good ideas out of existence."
"You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only."
"I don't think people give Indian society enough credit. We may not like to talk much about things but we do, basically, want to live and let live."
"Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one."
"Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something."
"All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca."
"Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out."
"I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure."
"Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted."
"There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy."
"It is exciting to write about the present once one gets beyond the trivia of the moment. As a time to live in, as a time to think about, the present is intriguing."
"Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them."