Optimism is a disease
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my...
What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories e...
Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn...
Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while ot...
They were deeply in love, which beats earplugs.
The process of revision should be constant and endless
Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.
Rowan (Atkinson) pochmurně přikyvoval a dodal, že nedávno v jednom televizním skeči použil záznam klečících muslimů při páteční modlitbě, podle něj v Teheránu, s následujícím komentářem: A pátrání po...
Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi t...
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
We can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse
The self was both its origins and its journey.
The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, support each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpos...
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.