Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

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.

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.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

Optimism is a disease

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

My heart broke open and history fell in.

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.

Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.

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.

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

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

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

...because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.

Peace broke out.

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

All names mean something.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.

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

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

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.