Quotes

Perhaps that line by Emily Dickinson sums everything up: "Memory is a strange bell – jubilee and knell." I suppose that's been ringing away in my head all these years.

Poets go directly to what they want to get across – they don't amble around, they cut to it with a tremendous immediacy that affects one.

So often one's writing is prophetic. When you write, you are in touch with another force, not the everyday force you employ, you retreat so deep into yourself, you don't suspect those feelings had been there.

Why am I constantly writing about the past? Well, I probably couldn't approach the present directly, because I was carrying all of this past with me.

I think everything one reads tends to linger on in one's writing, even after one's forgotten the book one's read.

It is a great influence on one's thoughts to be always on the outside, not belonging.

A lament, a protest, a statement. Those have to be made. I suppose that is what we write for. The human animal certainly has a need to make his statement, to retrieve something from the wreck of time.

That was the way life was: it lay so quiet, so still that you put your fingers out to touch it, to stroke it. Then it leapt up and struck you full in the face so that you spun about and spun about, gasping.

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.