The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, wh...
The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?
She watched him recede into the past as he stood...each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever.
Rich kid, Shiva yelled, you don't know one damn thing! What , man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got , yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, m...
Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . .That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever s...
My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
My heart broke open and history fell in.
Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogene...
Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.
Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persi...
It was always women who did the choosing, and men's place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones. Joseph Anton
In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.
In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning...
In my stolen photographs -- for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities -- it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the l...
If you were an atheist, Birbal, the Emperor challenged his first minister, what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world? Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikramp...
I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to crea...
I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.
Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why.
Human beings have a remarkable talent for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base.
History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.