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.
Fury…sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal….drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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.
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.
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.
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I’m just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help.
for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.
Tai tapped his left nostril. ‘You know what this is, Nakkoo? It’s the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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 to toddle.
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.
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.
Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.
You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.
The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free cou
If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.
A man who catches History’s eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own
History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.
This may be the curse of the human race, not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.
…because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.
It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.
During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy
I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one’s poor parents.
Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
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.
Our lives teach us who we are.” I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own … then you might as well be dead.
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.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.
This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.
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.
human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions
…that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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.
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.
One minute you’ve got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it’s done a bunk.
Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)
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 airwaves.
Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.
Parents are impelled by the profit motive – nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.
Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.
The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.
Did you know, ji,’ Zulu offered, ‘that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.
Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind.
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time’s records before long.
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages . . .
What kind of God is it who’s upset by a cartoon in Da
Don’t you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.
Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.
I’d rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens.
I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.
I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.
You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance, don’t think you stand a fucking chance.
OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2… priceless.
How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then?
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
When thought becomes excessively painful action is the finest remedy.
When people do the cowardly thing, it’s not about respect, it’s about fear.
I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I’m unusual among the writers I know in that respect.
If my child had prejudice in his head, I’d be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there’s a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don’t have feelings; they don’t get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
I’ve always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.
There’s a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody’s family. We all pretend to outsiders that it’s not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.
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 don’t like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn’t learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way.
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 that Christianity did torture people.
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.
I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
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.
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 do.’
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
I’m not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.
In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
Like everybody else, I’ve had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn’t trust the person I was in love with one inch.
The suicide bomber’s imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people’s lives.
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
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.
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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 dream.