Jeet Thayil

"I was born in the south of India but I've never lived there. I went to school in Bombay, and in Hong Kong and in New York. But the place I've lived in the most is Bombay, because I've been there at va…"

"You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke."

"We didn’t know that right before us Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar had just read from The Satanic Verses in a separate session. The minute I finished, people were queuing for me to sign copies of Narco…"

"Women are more evolved biologically and emotionally, that’s well known and it’s obvious. But they confuse sex and the spirit; they don’t separate. Men, as you know, always separate: they separate thei…"

"The thing about opium is that it makes you vomit. You cook the original raw sticky pellet against the bowl of the pipe. And for the first three or four months, you puke. But it’s a clean very easy puk…"

"It would be nice if things changed in the sense that they became more cosmopolitan, more inclusive, wider rather than narrower, with a kind of a view towards the future and a view towards many differe…"

"A friend from Hong Kong had turned up in Bombay and took me to an opium den in Crawford Market. I walked in and saw this room with three pipes. Everything happened at floor level. It was like a bubble…"

"You may lose something, but you gain a double perspective, a double vision. Especially in terms of writing, or in terms of art, I think it's tremendously useful."