1
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?Zia Haider Rahman
2
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.Zia Haider Rahman
3
It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think?Zia Haider Rahman
4
How many senators have taken their conception of what America can do from what they’ve seen on the American movie screen?Zia Haider Rahman
5
Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience.Zia Haider Rahman
6
An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.Zia Haider Rahman