I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.

It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

Nobody can send me to Pakistan. India is my country, and I love my country. Five generations of my family have lived and died on this land, and even my children will live in this country because this is my homeland.

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.

Thirty, 40 years ago, more than that now, even, the cook was certainly at the bottom of the social scale. And any mother would've wanted their child to marry a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, not a cook. Now, we are genius, it's different.

I've never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn't mean for me to have kids so that everybody else's children could be mine.