I Don't Feel I Can

That Element Of Surprise Is What I Look For When I Am Writing. It Is My Way Of Judging What I Am Doing - Which Is Never An Easy Thing To Do.

Many Writers Tend To Write Summing-up Books At The End Of Their Lives.

It Was A Good Place For Getting Lost In, A City No One Ever Knew, A City Explored From The Neutral Heart Outward, Until After Many Years, It Defined Itself Into A Jumble Of Clearings Separated By Stretches Of The Unknown, Through Which The Narrowest Of Paths Had Been Cut.

Out Of Its Squalor And Human Decay, Its Eruptions Of Butchery, India Produced So Many People Of Grace And Beauty, Ruled By Elaborate Courtesy. Producing Too Much Life, It Denied The Value Of Life; Yet It Permitted A Unique Human Development To So Many. Nowhere Were People So Heightened, Rounded And Individualistic; Nowhere Did They Offer Themselves So Fully And With Such Assurance. To Know Indians Was To Take A Delight In People As People; Every Encounter Was An Adventure. I Did Not Want India To Sink [out Of My Memory]; The Mere Thought Was Painful.

If It Was Europe That Gave Us On The Coast Some Idea Of Our History, It Was Europe, I Feel, That Also Introduced Us To The Lie.