"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."

"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."

"History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it."

"If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one."

"What's the use of stories that aren't even true?"

"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."

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."

"Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools."

"If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow."

"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."

"A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second."

"A little thinking is a dangerous thing."

"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 ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue."

"Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness."

"Death and life were just adjacent verandas."

"But great tragedy is universal."

"Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too."

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

"Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions."

"One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk."

"I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me."

"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."

"What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry."

"When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away."

"Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes."

"Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what."

"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."

"OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2... priceless."

"An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings."

"Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?"

"Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you."

"When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love."

"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."

"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 end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End."

"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."

"Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths."

"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."

"It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out."

"I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important."

"Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations."

"Realism can break a writer's heart."

"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."

"Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go."

"Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' - 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. 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."

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

"Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens."

"Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."

"He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide."