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...
Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience.
But that delusional urge is only one of the varieties of self-deception that encourage us to believe we know another human being and, for that matter, ourselves. This faith in having the measure of others really becomes unstuck when you begin to cons...
An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.
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 unbu...
It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think?
