Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

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

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

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

A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

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

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

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.

We all owe death a life.

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.

Faith without doubt is addiction

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.

What can't be cured must be endured.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

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

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)

We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.

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.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

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

Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

What you were is forever who you are.

A book is not completed till it's read.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.