It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why did success pass me by?

Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

I can't have composite characters. I can't attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

Born from sea foam high up to the tops of the waves on the trail of love.

Human behavior is only unpredictable and dangerous if you don’t start from humanity in the first place.

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.

Control your own destiny or someone else will.

As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.

Our griefs cannot mar the melody of our praise, we reckon them to be the bass part of our life's song, 'He hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad.'

You can get an awful lot of effects into the customer's mind for a great deal less time and money in radio than you can in television.

Briefcases, like CEOs, should never look new and unused.

Easter is always the answer to "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!"

I wouldnt be where I am today without the amazing public arts education that I had.