The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India’s, which is still….

In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. Th….

Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many….

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head..

In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant ….

I think excessive rationality can be very dangerous. Certainly the kind of rationality we've seen in the last hundred years, and still see on a daily….

We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-i….

The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism..

If you belong to a small country that is geopolitically not that important, or strategically not that important, you have no place among nations. Tho….

I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated on the myth of history..

I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yoursel….

I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possi….

I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two..

I am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition which stood in the way….

The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American, I have been pa….

There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end being a utopia of happiness that ….

I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since then has just been….

You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're ….

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations..

Most writers have very little that's important or valuable to offer; most of them are just repeating each other..

I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fict….