Quotes by Zia Haider Rahman

About Zia Haider Rahman:

Zia Haider Rahman is a novelist who was born in Bangladesh and raised in the UK. His debut novel, In the Light of What We Know, was published in 2014 to international critical acclaim. In August 2015, Rahman was awarded the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Zia Haider Rahman

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...

Zia Haider Rahman

Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience.

Zia Haider Rahman

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...

Zia Haider Rahman

An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.

Zia Haider Rahman

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...

Zia Haider Rahman

It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think?

Zia Haider Rahman

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

Zia Haider Rahman

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.

Zia Haider Rahman

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

Zia Haider Rahman

No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need.

Zia Haider Rahman

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

Zia Haider Rahman

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

Zia Haider Rahman

I wasn’t as untrusting. I had faith in the goodness of people, the perfection of love. What happened? Everything ends. And it’s how they end that leaves the lasting effect.

Zia Haider Rahman

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

Zia Haider Rahman

Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

Zia Haider Rahman

Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.

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...

Zia Haider Rahman

You think people never say what they mean. The truth is, nine times out of ten what they say is all they mean.

Zia Haider Rahman

Difficult questions can have simple answers.

Zia Haider Rahman

Author Bio

  • NameZia Haider Rahman
  • DescriptionBritish novelist
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionNovelist