“Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?”

“In life's brief game to be a winnerA man must have...oh yes, aboveAll else, of course, someone to love.”

“But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.”

“What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.”

“I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat...and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.”

“A Word Of ThanksTo these I know a debt past telling:My several muses, harsh and kind;My folks, who stood my sulks and yelling,And (in the long run) did not mind;Dead legislators, whose orationsI've filched to mix my own potations;Indeed, all those whose brains I've pressed,Unmerciful, because obsessed;My own dumb soul, which on a pittanceSurvived to weave this fictive spell;And, gentle reader, you as well,The fountainhead of all remittance.Buy me before good sense insistsYou'll strain your purse and sprain your wrists.”

“Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.”