To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.

The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

For many people, the family is portrayed as the settled place of reasonable safety, but as anyone who has read 'The God of Small Things' would know, for me it was a dangerous place. I felt humiliated in that space. I wanted to get away as soon as I could.

My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.

I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.

We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.

If you're too much in control, you feel too secure in your shoes, and where's the emotion to keep going in life? To keep that spark going, you have to feel like an outsider.

I went through a long period of time in that marriage when I didn't believe anything was my fault. I had to face what my part was, and only because of that difficult work was I able to trust a man again.