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I guess I reinvented myself about 18 times throughout my career.

And then I wrote my first autobiography when I - well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I've written about one book every two years.

As a journalist for 35 years, and now author for 20, I've learned that there's always more.

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

Even to this day, I rarely read any articles on myself. I won't watch anything on television on myself.

When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.

I had been saying to myself for a good many years that I was really a writer and that I was in advertising temporarily.

Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.

When I read 'Another Country' when I was in my early 20s, you know, as soon as I put the book down, my first thought was, 'I will never be able to write a book like this.' And my second thought was, 'I really want to try writing a book like this for the 21st century.'

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.