The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places.
Remember that what you have is unique because it’s your own special way of looking at the world.
Reading is my greatest luxury.
People still come up to me and ask whether I am Louise Brown or if they’ve seen me somewhere else before.
I’m working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.
I used to think about how I was conceived quite a lot when I was about 10 or 11, but I don’t think about it at all now that so many other babies have been born in the same way.
I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.
Don’t write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.
I can’t pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.
I have a good collection of cookery books. This is not so much because I like cooking, but because I like eating.
I don’t envy men and I certainly wouldn’t like to become one now.
I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
Don’t call ’em dogs. Dogs are loyal and they run after balls.
I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.
Much of my reading time over the last decade and a half has been spent reading aloud to my children. Those children’s bedtime rituals of supper, bath, stories, and sleep have been a staple of my life and some of the best, most special times I can remember.
When I was a child and teenager I read whenever I had the opportunity, but since then I’ve found it hard to read as much as I’d like, children, work, and pets all providing powerful incentives to escape into a book and a practical reason why I rarely do so.
The richest most meaningful stories are found in small places: made, carried, crafted, told, and retold by apparently unimportant people.
I like many types of music and probably too many to mention here.
I’m playing catch with Nisha and Nena. They’re standing against the opposite wall shrieking with enjoyment. They’re teenagers, but they’ve never played catch before and lack any sense of coordination; when they throw the ball to me it flies in any direction. Sometimes it hits the wall behind them. We’ve been playing for half an hour and they have only caught it twice.
Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week.