Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
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.
As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in...
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...
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But t...
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.
We can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse
Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions
Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatoz...
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...
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.
India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the...
If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant...
Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I...
It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
When thought becomes excessively painful action is the finest remedy.
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.