I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The ti...
I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizen's opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free...
I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.
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.
How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the...
History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.
He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again;
Give up on me he begged her. I don't like people dropping in to see me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven tiles and kabaddi, I can't recite my prayers, I don't know what should happ...
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight agai...
But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their: Their:In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather.Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion t...
But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.
Be so good as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.
At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers make with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is sp...
In words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.
Every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales (...)
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
You will see, as time goes by, said Ibn Rushd, that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but...
This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, a...