Kashmir, the 86, 000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and it gets really, really bleak looking.

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.

There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return

This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

...If there is no risk, there is no reward.

Pain is essential for survival, pain is the tangible material that creeps into our mind and screams at us to recognize that something is terribly wrong.

We can only become a better person if we have the inclination and the resolve, only if we accept that life is a learning curve and all experiences add something to our personality.

We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature, and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

I am thinking about those things now. More so than all my friends - they're a lot older than me, but they're not even thinking about babies.

Let no man trust the first false step of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice, whose steep descent in last perdition ends.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven't fallen since.

I don’t need the factory behind me. I just need help getting my music heard.