Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive.

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.

Beliefs are choices. First you choose your beliefs. Then your beliefs affect your choices.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

I had stopped doing anything for myself. I no longer felt like an individual because for thirteen years, I was one-half of a “we.

The more handles one creates at the moment of learning, the more likely the information is to be assessed at a later date. The handles we can add revolve around content, timing, and environment.

To be free of the discriminating is to manifest miraculous awareness-awareness that is miraculously simple, miraculously unadorned.

Passion, this absolute desire that can never be filled when it is driven by the absence of the other.

You can't live up to what people expect. Nobody can. But I guess that's my problem, not theirs.

The one you fight with the most is always the one who’s most like you.

Crossing barriers can be as simple as a smile.

It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.