We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn't.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

I'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

If you write a lovely story about India, you're criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you're seen as portraying it in a negative light - it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars.

Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all... And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity – oh, the tediousness of it... Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

She had been mistaken – she was only the center to herself, as always, and a small player playing her part in someone else’s story.

What was a country but the idea of it?

Perhaps that’s why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place : the self consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.

The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness...