"The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust rags to rags fear to fear. "
- V.S. Naipaul
"I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than I h..."
"It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling..."
"Small things start us in new ways of thinking"
"And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. (...) I gained courage; every afternoon I w..."
"What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall--..."
"It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects."
"A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The bea..."
"A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur."
"paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer"