Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.
My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.
Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.
Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.
The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.
The fact is that America's weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.
The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.
The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it - and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.
The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.
The war against terror is not really about terror. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hemegony.
There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that.
There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.
There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.
There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.
There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.
To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.
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