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I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.

The key Hindu concept of dharma — the right way, the sanctioned way, which all men must follow, according to their natures — is an elastic concept. At its noblest it combines self-fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel.

Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing.

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.

Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.

There are moments when her voice is all he needs.

If on some occasion I happen to read something in it — because, for instance, I need to know a date — I am always disconcerted to find that two or five years ago I came to exactly the same conclusion, only to forget it because I had not succeeded in living up to it; in fact, I had tenaciously been doing the very opposite.