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If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.

I often find myself unsatisfied with books 'about' Indians because they are written from the viewpoint of non-Indians.

Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better.

Many journalists are influenced by a myopic multiculturalism that is suspicious of anything Western, while giving the benefit of the doubt to non-Western societies.