“I poured my heart and soul into the role of Chandramukhi. In my view, hers was the greater character (compared with Paro's). One scene that will forever be etched in my memory is the one in which Devdas takes leave of Chandramukhi, saying that he hopes he will meet her again, 'if not in this lifetime, then in the next.”

“I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.”

“I am eternally grateful to those friends and others who gave me more than I could give to them. Memories of them are etched in my heart and will remain there forever.”

“I bequeath my soul to God… My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.”

“Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?”

“Her soul in the balance, my heart in her hands
I made her a widow, she made me a man.”

“I kiss'd her lips: oh, God, the chill!
My heart is frozen with it still:—
It was as suddenly on me
Open'd my depths of misery.
I flung me on the ground, and raved,
And of the wind that past me craved
One breath of poison, till my blood
From lip and brow gush'd in one flood.
I watch'd the warm stream of my veins
Mix with the death wounds clotted stains;
Oh! how I pray'd that I might pour
My heart's tide, and her life restore!”

“My favorite book is my next one. I’m always hoping to make my next book my best one.”

“In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?”

“When he watched her sleeping, he often thought, My heart lies vulnerable outside my chest.”