Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Do you know I used to pride myself on the fact that I'd never booked a show in my life, but that I'd played so many because I'd been invited?
All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.
Everything has the potential to be extraordinary, whether an old photograph, a book or a life. If you find it ordinary, you simply need to take a closer look.
Most of us... are simply just trying to get through the day. And wait for those times in their life that are markers, that put things into relief. That's why we like movies and books so much.
I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.
Well, it's so hard for books to take off. You give years of your life to something that probably won't happen, so when it does, it feels a little... unjust.
I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.
Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.
'Shantaram' is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to 'Shantaram,' the first a prequel.
Instead of reading a paper, we now read the news online. Instead of buying books at a store, we buy them on-line. What's so revolutionary? The Internet has mainly affected our leisure life.
Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do - or would want to see in real life.
I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.
There was a day where I was sitting at my desk, working 90-hour work weeks, in a suit, looking at a computer, with all these pitch books on my desk, and I just thought, 'This can't be my life.'
Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.
There are no makeovers in my books. The ugly duckling does not become a beautiful swan. She becomes a confident duck able to take charge of her own life and problems.
A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.
