No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need.

Everyone, he continued, wants his life to stand for something other than what it would, which is about eighty years – in the West, at any rate – eighty years of working, eating, sleeping, shitting, breeding, and dying. Lives of buttoning and unbuttoning – who said that?

Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.

Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you.

When evil enters the world, do you think it comes with horns and cloven feet, billowing some foul stench?

Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

At every stage, the world that breaks in through our senses struggles to find a footing in our brains. We might liken memories to the messages recorded on tape, but we mistake the message for the medium, or the other way round, for memory is the tape itself. When I listen to my memories now, I believe that all they tell me are the stories about themselves.

Our choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm us and devour us.

It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think?

It is no consolation to reflect that every cause itself is an effect, making the search for causes and reasons a fool’s errand.

How many senators have taken their conception of what America can do from what they’ve seen on the American movie screen?

I wasn’t as untrusting. I had faith in the goodness of people, the perfection of love.What happened?Everything ends. And it’s how they end that leaves the lasting effect.

Is that not the Promethean fable, that the fire stolen from the gods will light men their way even while it burns their hands?

Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience.

I am too much of an imitator to be a true writer.

An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.

Difficult questions can have simple answers.