Zitat des Tages über Charles Dickens:
I rolled myself up into a tight ball of resistance and it was thus that I went through my school years.
We discount the physical, when, in fact, much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath.
No one is India.
My own writing has perhaps more of an American flavor than a British one, but that's because the stories I've so far written have needed it. 'Empire State,' 'Seven Wonders' and 'The Age Atomic' are all very place-centric, where the setting itself is almost a character. But there is a universality to story that isn't just limited to science fiction.
It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
The soul is healed by being with children.
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by.
To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.
Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.
The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.
The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
Love is not a volunteer thing.
Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.
One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.
You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.
Women... can't live with 'em... can't shoot 'em.
'Il faut vivre' might almost be the French national motto from 1940 to June 1944, but who is to say ours would have been any different if the Germans had paraded victoriously through London and Generalfeldmarschall Von Runstedt made his headquarters at Claridge's?
I was incredibly inspired by Oprah Winfrey as a young woman.
I haven't been part of the criminal world.
There is a kind of mysticism to writing.
I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.
I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.
From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.
Nor, in our own country, must we fail to take notice of the establishment of School Boards.
I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme.
Let's find out what everyone is doing, And then stop everyone from doing it.
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
Every one, more or less, loves Power, yet those who most wish for it are seldom the fittest to be trusted with it.
