Khushwant Singh Quotes

Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion.

No one has invented a condom for the pen yet. My pen is still sexy.

When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.

Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view.

The last to learn of gossip are the parties concerned

Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.

When you have counted eighty years and more, Time and Fate will batter at your door; But if you should survive to be a hundred, Your life will be death to the very core.

But big people’s illnesses are always made to sound big. The simple shutting and opening of the royal arse-hole was made to sound as if the world was coming to an end.

I have never lost my temper. I let out my venom in my writing if I have to, but person-to-person, I have never lost my temper, never used abusive language.

I acquired long-lived parents. My mother died at 94. Father died at 90, holding a glass of whisky. I think that's the secret of longevity - to have long-lived parents. The rest is discipline.

I haven't any close friends. Friendship needs time to interact, sit down, gossip. I don't have that time.

I think the sense of belonging does give you a certain amount of mental satisfaction.

I don't want to be cremated, I want to be buried. I don't believe in wasting wood and I feel that one should give back to the earth.

I discovered that a diplomat's life is largely entertaining and meeting people. At the end of the day there's nothing. So I gave up.

I was never a cardholder. But I was leftist in the sense that I voted communist.

I am alone, but never lonely. You have always books around you.

Friends meddle with my plan of work. I resent people dropping in for a chat.

I am not a serious person. I don't claim any profundity for any of my writing.

I am prolific. Any rubbish I write gets published, so books keep churning out.

I turned to the Partition experiences, which were churning in my mind. Then came my first novel Train to Pakistan.

I was unhappy with the jobs I did after law. I got into the diplomatic service. There again I had really little to do.

I have never, in 50 years, ever missed a deadline [as a journalist].

I did subscribe to the freedom movement and I was much closer to the Congress than to the Akali party. It is a communal party.

In America, they make a lot of fuss over little things.