"There are writers -- Tolstoy and Henry James to name two -- whom we hold in awe, writers -- Turgenev and Chekhov -- for whom we feel a personal affection, other writers whom we respect - Conrad for example -- but who hold us at a long arm's length with their 'courtly foreign grace.' Narayan (whom I don't hesitate to name in such a context) more than any of them wakes in me a spring of gratitude, for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could have never have known what it is like to be Indian."

"Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of the colorfull teeming that Narayan's fiction city of Malgudi conveys."