There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

Excitement always leads to tears.

Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states - Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America's Saudi Arabia.

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.

India lives in several centuries at the same time.

Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it.

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

Your enemies are always manufactured to suit your purpose, right? How can you have a good enemy? You have to have an utterly evil enemy - and then the evilness has to progress.

The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.