Quotes from Monica Ali

People don't get involved with local charities or politics because they think it's hard to make a difference and the problem feels overwhelming. But I believe that if all I've time for this year is to write one letter to the local council, it's still worth doing.

Outside of interviews, I spend very little time thinking about myself. I spend time thinking about my writing and my children and other things that are pertinent.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

Some writers are more natural public performers than others; personally I find it quite strange giving interviews. But everyone has parts of their job that they like more than others. You can't complain if you get to do what you love doing most of the time, can you?

Character is always my driving force. And to tell a good story and to provide an entertaining read.

A new car is not going to change your life.

You know how if you're born in a certain situation you always expect your life to run on a steady trajectory? I've never really had a sense of that. I assume that life is going to go up and down.

I get really excited if I think I'm going to introduce somebody to a writer they haven't found before and I think they'll love. My favorite books to get as gifts are any that the giver is messianic about.

A pair of schoolchildren,pale as rice and loud as peacocks,cut over the road and hurtled down a side street,galloping with joy or else with terror (p. 55).

Sinking, sinking, drinking water. When everyone in the village was fasting a long month,when not a grain, not a drop of water passed between the parched lips of any able-bodied man, woman or child over the age of ten, when the sun was hotter than the cooking pot and dusk was just a febrile wish, the hypocrite went down to the pond to duck his head, to dive and sink, to drink and sink a little lower. p. 105

And the city itself was just a glow on the dark earth...

The air was hot and wet, as if it had absorbed the sweat of countless bodies. It dripped also with scandal.

Her need for love is as wide as that sky out there and as impossible for an unwinged mortal to fulfill.

A man cannot live without water. He cannot live without it, but he can bear the thought of no water. A man can live without sex. He can live without it, but he cannot bear the thought of no sex.

Suddenly, she was gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well.

When you have fallen low, she told herself, what hurts is pretending you are high.

We open a book, we turn a newspaper page, we allow the television and the radio to come into our homes. All the things we are told every day - are the true?

Nishi's sister, who was sixteen years old, had gone for a holiday in Sylhet and returned six months later with a husband and a swelling belly. Nishi, strong on forward-planning skills, was taking evasive action: she was going on a holiday of her own and she would return when she was twenty-five. At that ancient age the danger of marriage was over.

I don't look down on them, but what can you do? If a man has only ever driven a rickshaw and never in his life held a book in his hand, then what can you expect from him?

What I did not know-I was a young man- is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.

In the rainy season, back home, when the land had given way to water and the buffaloes grew webbed feet, when the hens took to the roofs, when marooned goats teetered on minuscule islands, when the women splashed across on the raised walkway to the cooking hut and found they could no longer kindle a dung-and-husk fire and looked to their reserves, when the rain rang louder than cow bells

Ma," said Yasmin. She hesitated. "Will you tell me properly about… how you met Baba? How you knew you wanted to marry him." Anisah turned to a tomato plant and began snipping and plucking. "I don't know. What can I tell you? I don't know." "Did you ever have any doubts?" "Things were very difficult," said Ma, elaborating further with some intricate head movements.

You look pale, Mini," said Baba, bringing the clubs down and rolling his shoulders. "You should take regular exercise. I will show you some basic movements. No better exercise in the world than Indian clubs. And naturally you can perform the routines outside. For myself I choose to be indoors, but it is a matter of personal preference. Begin with the feet in the ten-to-two position… if you can't manage then hip distance apart is acceptable…

Arif expended so much energy defining himself in opposition to other people, other musical tastes, other fashions, other views, other politics, other members of his own family that he was too exhausted to know who he really was. He thought she was weak and he was strong because he rebelled and she did not. But it took strength to work hard and do your duty, and it was she who had what she wanted in this world. He didn't even know what he wanted. She felt sorry for him.