I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘How shall we live?’ And I would say I don’t need religion to answer those questions.
I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.
I for one don’t need a supreme “sacred” arbiter in order to be a moral being.
Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.
I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn’t know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
Terror is glamour – not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there’s something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.
We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.
People don’t like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we’re bored.
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn’t work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading “acts” too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.
What can’t be cured must be endured.
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
What you were is forever who you are.
You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that’s happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.