I've Never Abandoned The Novel.

I Have Trusted To My Intuition To Find The Subjects, And I Have Written Intuitively. I Have An Idea When I Start, I Have A Shape; But I Will Fully Understand What I Have Written Only After Some Years.

I Had No Student Friends To Talk To About Literature. My Tutor Was A Really Nice Man, Very Charming - But He Had No Literary Judgment.

Out Of Its Squalor And Human Decay, Its Eruptions Of Butchery, India Produced So Many People Of Grace And Beauty, Ruled By Elaborate Courtesy. Producing Too Much Life, It Denied The Value Of Life; Yet It Permitted A Unique Human Development To So Many. Nowhere Were People So Heightened, Rounded And Individualistic; Nowhere Did They Offer Themselves So Fully And With Such Assurance. To Know Indians Was To Take A Delight In People As People; Every Encounter Was An Adventure. I Did Not Want India To Sink [out Of My Memory]; The Mere Thought Was Painful.

Life Is A Helluva Thing. You Can See Trouble Coming And You Can't Do A Damn Thing To Prevent It Coming. You Just Got To Sit And Watch And Wait.

To This Day, If You Ask Me How I Became A Writer, I Cannot Give You An Answer. To This Day, If You Ask Me How A Book Is Written, I Cannot Answer. For Long Periods, If I Didn't Know That Somehow In The Past I Had Written A Book, I Would Have Given Up.