Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
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.
We all owe death a life.
The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
Faith without doubt is addiction
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
Realism can break a writer's heart.
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
What can't be cured must be endured.
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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.
A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
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I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)
We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.
I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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.
Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.
He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
What you were is forever who you are.
A book is not completed till it's read.
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.
Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
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.
People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.
My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...
Optimism is a disease
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
My heart broke open and history fell in.
Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
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 to life.
The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.
What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .
A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
 the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled. )
If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.
Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.
One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.
Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.
Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
...because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.
Peace broke out.
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.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.
All names mean something.
Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.
Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.
Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.
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.
You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
