To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music. . .

Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence

Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

Its origins are ancient but it burgeons with brash modernity, and it lounges upon its delectable shore, halfway between the Israelis and the Syrians, in a posture that no such city, at such a latitude, in such a moment of history, has any reasonable excuse for assuming.