The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all year long and get two weeks off! It's incredible.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two.

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world.

The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America.

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

I’m bored to death. Perhaps I should pillage one of my neighbors for my own amusement. It seems to work for Drowden.

Maybe this is crazy, but I think the right to own a gun is trumped by the right not to be shot by one.

Theme-park approach to nature. We judge plants and animals by whether they're entertaining to us. We gravitate toward animals and plants that are big, dramatic, beautiful and at eye-level.

To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.

That boy is your company. And if he wants to eat up that tablecloth, you let him, you hear?

Social media is the ultimate canary in the coal mine

There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman; and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.

Why be so nasty and so rude, when I can be so fierce and so successful.

I guess I'm a spiritual secularist, if that's not an oxymoron. My paths of secularism and spirituality are the same: I try to do the appropriate thing at each moment.