The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in...
And I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be.
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one mig...
They were deeply in love, which beats earplugs.
Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes.
The self was both its origins and its journey.
She'd never shaken off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might be like to be wholly possessed by the archetypal, capitalized djinn, the yearning towards, the blurring o...
She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. Things are ending, he told her. This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian...
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt. The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosa...
Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman, he said.
Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return,...
Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He’s the one not to believe because he’s the elite and the elites are against the people, they will do the peo...
Naught but love makes magic real.
Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we had lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.
Morality came before religion, and religion was our ancestors' way of responding to that built-in need. And if that was so, then it was perfectly possible to lead a good life, to have a strong sense o...
Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Keep away from her, said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babie...
It seems there is no such thing as a purely good deed, a completely right action. Even this task, which i took on for the very best of reasons, involves making choices that are not that good, choices...
Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes t...