Come on, a 25-page digression on god? You can’t have that kind of thing, cut it out!”

Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts, and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency?

We're waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.

How will the ships navigate without stars? And then he remembered that the stars were dead, long dead, and the light they shed was not to be trusted, was false, if not an outright lie, and in any case was inadequate, unequal to its task, which was to illuminate the evil that men did.

I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay

All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.

My religion is no way of knowing me.