33 Quotes by Zia Haider Rahman

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.

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

Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.