...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.

Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?

India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.

What a sense of possession, of confidence, it gave one to have pockets, to shove one's fists into them, as if in simply owning pockets one owned riches, owned independence.

My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

It’s only when we are able to exceed our rigid interpretations, and we start defining love in it’s totality, that we realize that love is everywhere

Men don't get cellulite. God might just be a man.

The pace of the game demanded a referee who was fit. It is an indictment of our game. You see referees abroad who are as fit as butcher's dogs. We have some who are fit. He wasn't fit.

Be not caught by the cunning of those who appear in a disguise.

We drink [to] one another's health and spoil our own.

When migraines briefly became a campaign issue for me, it appeared that political foes were maybe playing the gender card.

We must study as hard how to live well as how to preach well.

It is not blood that makes you Irish but a willingness to be part of the Irish Nation.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle grateful that they are not worse rather than the rough handle, bitter that they are not better.