The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

Enquanto a queda dos anjos era uma simples questão de poder; nem mais nem menos do que um trabalhinho de policiamento celestial, o castigo de uma rebelião, uma atitude de dureza pour décourageur les autres....

natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear...

…one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc’s voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled...

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next,...

eduvstThe fact is that in any open society people constantly say things that other people don’t like. It’s completely normal that should happen. And in any confident, free society you just shrug it off and...

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did...

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

A book is not completed till it’s read.

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god […], I’m willing to bet he’s an atheist too.

Running along the bank was a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking worriedly at a clock. Appearing and disappearing at various points on both banks was a dark blue British police telephone booth, out...

Fury…sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal….drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths

Yes, I know there is a fashion nowadays for these Hitler’s-valet type memoirs, and many people are against, they say we should not humanise the inhuman. But the point is they are not inhuman, these...

So-called Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are...

Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of...

A poet’s work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a...

And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying...

That was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was our tragedy. We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and...

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.

One minute you’ve got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it’s done a bunk.

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of...

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation...

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time’s records before long.

What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?

When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of...

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he’d told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to...

…that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.

You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance,...

It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars...

Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.

Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2… priceless.

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his...

Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it’s a sort of compensation for having been born. ‘There are no strings...

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well,...

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Unless, of course, there’s no such thing as chance;…in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror...

Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn’t destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny....

Death and life were just adjacent verandas.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

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...