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.
One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
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...
Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpot… I had to go into exile to learn that the children of...
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.
It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn't a part of...
How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, notvery far at all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another...
In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe
Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwav...
There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are...
Докато не му ги зададат, човек не знае отговорите на въпросите на живота.
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us.
Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:All our dream-worlds may come true.Fairy lands are fearsome too.
You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke.
Why demons, when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, w...
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was a...
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...
The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains...