The self was both its origins and its journey.

Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

If power was a a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others.

Khattam-Shud,’ he said slowly, ‘is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life...

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but...

When…did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A...

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on...

Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews,...

We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the...

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.The problem’s name is God.

When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to try to be a full-time writer.’ Oh, his boss said, you want a lot more money....

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

Don’t you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I’m just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell...

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.

No, I can’t.” That was the end of their chat.

…what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was…it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set’s emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real...

A man who catches History’s eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

…because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to...

human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,’ said Birbal, ‘and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed...

They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had...

Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.

Akhir yang bahagia harus terjadi pada akhir sesuatu, jika terjadi di pertengahann cerita atau sebuah petualangan, atau yang semacamnya, yang terjadi hanyalah hiburan sejenak. (Anjing Laut pada Harun, hal. 207)

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Those families are exactly like my family.

Non mi piacciono i matrimoni combinati. Ci sono sbagli dei quali non bisognerebbe mai poter incolpare i propri poveri genitori.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of...

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person’s comforting, defining sense...

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never...

Women have always moaned about men…but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by...

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the...

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest...

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

What’s a doctor, after all? A legitimized voyeur, a stranger whom we permit to poke fingers and even hands into places where we would not permit most people to insert so much as a finger-tip,...

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren’t listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don’t see how your gestures already mirror his; you don’t see him in...

Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.