I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.

My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

I have always kept notes and have kept letters from my friends and mother, which is rather depressing, as it takes you to the past.

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death.

We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.