We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.

I'm very content.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.