top of page

"Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers."
Standard
Customized
More

"When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Ambition is greed without makeup."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Don't just raise the bar. Raise the roof."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Whenever God wants to intervene in the affairs of the earth, he intervenes through light, illumination, knowledge, insight, understanding, wisdom."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It seemed, at that point, my greed and cunningness were being rewarded."
Author Name
Personal Development

"All you need is a dream to drive you nuts."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object " we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It was an impossible achievement but that didn't stop me from trying and having fun."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Everyone dreams of greatness and expects it to happen in the future automatically."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A dream is the reality of a future that exists in a person's imagination."
Author Name
Personal Development
More


"Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone."
Legacy


"I hate admitting that my enemies have a point."
Enemy


"One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable."
Events


"And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlesness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin."
Growth


"I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story."
Art


"Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."
Fight


"In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee."
Creativity


"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."
Society


"The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask."
Philosophy


"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."
Evolution
bottom of page