Would America have been America without her Negro people?
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.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. . . . Actually Existing Islam. . . which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.
Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.
When I meet people from other cultures I know that they too want happiness and do not want suffering, this allows me to see them as brothers and sisters.
There's something that's really fun about the challenge of making the mundane funny, too, I think.
I do love nothing in the world so well as you- is not that strange?