“As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.”
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I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'
I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted... I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded.
There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.
