gulmohur quarterly

 What was the basis of the writer's attitude? What other world did he know? What other experience did he bring to his way of looking? How could a writer write about this world, if it was the only world he knew? 

V S Naipaul

 Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition. 

Samuel Beckett

 There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. 

Arundhati Roy

 Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own. 

Julian Barnes

 Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 ...loss is essential, loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose - slough off, like a moulting snake. Losing and losing again, is the very basis of the process, till all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence... 

Rohinton Mistry

 ...we try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule? 

Doris Lessing

 Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is. 

Saul Bellow

 Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won. 

Paul Celan

 Indifferentism is the worst kind of disease that can affect people. 

B R Ambedkar

 I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore. 

Virginia Woolf

 Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. 

Albert Camus

 If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. 

Haruki Murakami

 We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. 

Ursula K. Le Guin

 When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. 

Zadie Smith