Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York." (on Tom Wolfe)

Inferiority complex begins when you agree that you are nothing. No one is responsible or author of it except yourself.

All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory.

I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging.

I nodded with genuine synthetic sympathy.

Do not get angry because others question what you believe, be calm and loving, for anger is the root of a faulty belief.

The blues ain't nothing but a good man feelin' bad.

The future will belong to those who have passion and are willing to work hard to make our country better

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

Being perceived as a guy is nothing new or complicated to me. It is what it is.