Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.
There’s a reason prophets perform miracles: language lacks the power to describe faith. And you have to land on faith before you can even begin to hike around to its flip side, betrayal.
I have this thing about friends and secrets. Sometimes when I meet a person I like, I tell them a secret they don’t know me well enough to be told. It lets me judge their potential as a friend.
She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.
Children are excellent judges of character, you know
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain
I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.
What happens is my mind starts to go in circles, thinking and thinking, and then I can’t sleep. And once a couple of days go by, if you haven’t slept, you start to get sick. You can’t eat. You start to cry. It just feeds on itself.
And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.
Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent—admittedly in my own best interest—on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.
…status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.
I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy’s sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.
You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.
Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.
one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.
Some men drink the blood of other men, all I drink is wine.
Pride tells me to give it back, but common sense tells pride to shut up, have a joint and relax. I shrug and put the note into my wallet.
In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.
I felt suddenly very young – or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.
And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she’s there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.
If differences can be hidden, perhaps there aren’t differences at all
Didn’t you tell me smoking ruined your stamina as a boxer? …Ruined is a strong word, I’d say….It helps fight boredom. It gives you more to do and less time to do it in.
Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.
America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.
I think there’s a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.
When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
‘Which is stronger, politics or love?’ is like asking, ‘Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?’ They are two sides of the same thing.
Like many of my friends in the Pakistani diaspora – and many of my friends in Pakistan itself, for that matter – I have sometimes looked at the country of my birth and wondered whether its future will be one of steady and sad decline.
Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.
When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.