ROHINTON MISTRY

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.

Children don't make judgments about which details are important... a child captures them all.

Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man's mode of transport.

In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical - imagination ground through the mill of memory. It's impossible to separate the two ingredients.

The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.

Zoroastrianism is about the opposition of good and evil. For the triumph of good, we have to make a choice. We can enlist on the side of good by prospering, making money and using our wealth to help others.

Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure.

Time had changed the magical to mundane

Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder

What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.

Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.

In foreign countries they fear baldness. They are so rich in foreign countries, they can afford to fear all kinds of silly things.

The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake

...the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.

So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different

There didn't seem to her any harm in it, and the make-believe was so comforting.

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them, sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success

But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

Let me tell you a secret: there is no such thing as an uninteresting life One day you must tell me your full and complete story, unabridged and unexpurgated.We will set aside some time for it, and meet. It's very important. Maneck smiled. 'Why is it important?' It's extremely important because it helps to remind yourself of who you are. Then you can go forward, without fear of losing yourself in this ever-changing world.

He who spits paan at the ceiling only blinds himself.

Loss is essential, loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose - slough off, like a moulting snake. Losing and losing again, is the very basis of the process, til all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence.