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.

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.