Quotes from Saadat Hasan Manto

He ate off dirty plates and was unfazed. His pillowcase was soiled and stank, but he never thought of changing it. Hamid thought long and hard, but he couldn't understand him. He often asked, 'Babuji, why aren't you revolted by dirtiness?

Literature is a symptom of the state of a society

His last years were beset with financial troubles; he drank heavily; he wrote to Chughtai on more than one occasion, pleading with her to find a way for him to come back to India. She was surprised to learn that far from large protests and signed declarations on his behalf, many in Pakistan felt he deserved to be punished. He died on January 18, 1955 in Lahore at the age of forty two.

I thought that the Hindus and Muslims would busy themselves in this war and their blood, which did not mix in mosque and temple, would finally mingle in Bombay's drains and gutters. I

She could crowd a thousand thoughts into her head, but it was, at that moment like a strainer -- the more she tried to fill up every little corner, the more emptiness there was.

When Hamid dropped Lata off at her house at nine that night, he felt hollow. The touch of her soft body was sheared from him like bark from a tree, and he spent the entire night tossing and turning.

God commands worship but doesn't five it. After having spent a few moments with nothingness, he gave life to existence ... but where is nothingness now? Like a mother it gave birth to existence and then died in childbirth.

If you are not familiar with the time period we are passing through, read my stories. If you cannot bear these stories, that means this is an unbearable time. The evils in me are those of this era.

When we were enslaved, we could imagine freedom, but now that we are free, how will we imagine subjection?

A little ahead was a shop burnt in the riots. A man now sat inside with two large slabs of ice on the floor. A thought came to me: 'At last the poor shop has the chance to cool itself.

She carried herself with the thought that she was a decent person and she often wondered why the men in her life were not decent too

They both were liars. Both led lives camouflaged in artifice. But Saugandhi was happy. Someone who cannot afford real gold will gladly settle for artificial jewelry.

These fragments that have helped shape your fulfillment are a part of my being; is there no connection between these and the rest of my person? Can the rest of me dissociate itself from these fragments? You have made yourself whole, but you have done so at the cost of my integrity. Is this what I defied you for?

Today we are called new writers. The coming tomorrow, considering us old, will lock us in closets, but that does not mean we have lived in vain.

Writers are not prophets. We see one thing, one problem in different conditions and from different angles, and whatever we understand we present to the world, and we never force it to accept it.

I am not seditious. I do not want to stir up people's ideas and feelings. If I take off the blouse of culture and society, then it is naked. I do not try to put clothes back on, because that is not my job.

Two or three years after the 1947 Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistan asylums were to be handed over to India. It was difficult to say whether the proposal made any sense or not.

A man is not responsible for the crime he commits, his circumstances are.

If there is a God, I implore him -- for God's sake destroy the laws of men, demolish their prisons and make your own prisons in the heavens. Punish them in your own courts, because if nothing else, you are at least, God.

If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth

I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.

Some people kiss as if they were eating watermelon

If a man has to make a woman the center of his love, why should he integrate animality into this sacred human emotion?...Is love incompelete without it?...Is love the name of physical excersize ?

If a man has to make a woman the center of his love, then why does he have to enter animality into it?...Can love not be complete without it?...Is love just the name of physical excercize?