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)