Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write. ”

The Moonstone' was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion. Enigmatic, dangerous priests who follow it across the ocean in hopes of wresting it back. ”

If you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate. ”

It's different for different people, and for a woman it's important to look as good she wants to look. But you don't need to do it for someone else or to impress some male out there. You do it for your own sake. You wear what makes you feel good, you put make-up and jewellery - whatever gives you self-confidence. ”

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.' ”

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings. ”

As I lived on in America, I got to truly know the people of this country - so many kind and wonderful people, people of so many races - who helped me in so many ways. Who became my friends. I realized that underneath our different accents, habits, foods, religions, ways of thinking, we shared a common humanity. ”

To make money for college, I worked in our college dining room. ”

I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom. ”

I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us. ”