"An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring... I ought to know."

"I work to stay alive."

"Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world."

"I was never very interested in boys - and there were plenty of them - vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay."

"When I'm not supposed to do something, it becomes more attractive to me."

"One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action."

"When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them."

"With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine."