Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!
We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.
And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.
Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.
When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.
In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.
I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.
Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.
I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.
In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?
Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'