Zia Haider Rahman

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”