385 Quotes About Asia

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.

People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.

In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.

Asia is an entertainment, Europe is a dream, America is an imprisonment and Rest is a nightmare.

Minding his own business had been his motto living in a strange foreign country with a world-recognized social issue of failing morals.

I was particularly fascinated by the story of the circumstances that led to the development of tertiary education in China. It seems hard to imagine—but there was a time when institutionalized education, formal curricula and exams didn’t exist.

Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood:...

She said, on another day, "I do think about the individuals involved, all of them and I sometimes wonder what they really felt at certain moments, I think all of them were very courageous people. Each of them displayed some kind of courage in making the changes that they did make.