“Ideally, a book of letters should be published posthumously. The advantages are obvious: the editor enjoys a free hand, and the author enjoys a perfect hiding place — the grave, where he is impervious to embarrassments and beyond the reach of libel. I have failed to cooperate with this ideal arrangement. Through some typical bit of mismanagement, I am still alive, and the book has had to adjust to that awkward fact.”

The book is clearly modelled on my career, even down to the name of the main character. That character's journalism is abysmal, and his views on Hindutva and Hinduism do not in any way reflect mine. I would disagree with them profoundly.
On the controversy created in a thinly-disguised novel which portrays him as a heartless philanderer and supporter of fanatics.
Source: Dean Nelson, " Former BBC correspondent Sir Mark Tully attacked in novel http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7552715/Former-BBC-correspondent-Sir-Mark-Tully-attacked-in-novel.html," in The Telegraph, 5 April 2010

2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.
Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.

Interview with Publishers Weekly (19 April 1993)

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 109

Source: The Power of One

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Afterword (1984)