Afar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Afar, 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.

— Zia Haider Rahman

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

— 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.

— Zia Haider Rahman

Difficult questions can have simple answers.

— 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 unbuttoning – who said that?

— 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

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

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

— 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

It is no consolation to reflect that every cause itself is an effect, making the search for causes and reasons a fool’s errand.

— Zia Haider Rahman