“Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incomplete...”

“The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans is as absurd & dangerous a fant...”

“As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than th...”

“In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.”

“National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceiv...”

“In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.”

“To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. I...”

“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle th...”

“Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage about what wed do,...”

“...if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men's homes.”

“There are no moral obligations in the game of empire.”

“Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp”

“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.”

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

“But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really ...”