30 Quotes by Saadat Hasan Manto

God commands worship but doesn’t five it. After having spent a few moments with nothingness, he gave life to existence... but where is nothingness now? Like a mother it gave birth to existence and then died in childbirth.

His last years were beset with financial troubles; he drank heavily; he wrote to Chughtai on more than one occasion, pleading with her to find a way for him to come back to India. She was surprised to learn that far from large protests and signed declarations on his behalf, many in Pakistan felt he deserved to be punished. He died on January 18, 1955 in Lahore at the age of forty two.

Writers rarely set out to be national writers. They need small, intimate worlds, full of details; the macro scale of countries, especially those as wide and various as India, cannot be their direct material.