A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling…

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

The chaos lies all within.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and...

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting...

…Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother’s bad blood...

It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.

How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn’t...