Gregory David Roberts quotes:

The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

I've been to Delhi, Madras, Bangalore and a lot of other cities, but I have never seen a crime set-up like that in Bombay.

More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India.

I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life.

The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly, and with the eyes open.

I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.

What is it?" she asked. "I'm looking for your wings. You are my guardian angel, aren't you?" "I'm afraid not," she replied, her cheeks dimplingwith a wry smile. "There's too much of the devil in me for that." "Just how much devil," I grinned, "are we talking about here?

Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

Heroes only come in three kinds:dead, damaged or dubious.

At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.

Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work.

Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn't sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same we call the dream a nightmare.

The lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.

A city may be dirty on the outside but is clean on the inside. Many cities in the world are clean on the outside but dirty on the inside.

There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call - I almost never recovered.

Gimme an honest frown over a false smile, any day.

I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.

every human heart beat is a universe of possibilities.

We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast. I have been in no hurry for eight years.

They are often brave, I'm sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars.

A young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: He brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice.

What is it? she askedI'm looking for your wings. You are my guardian angel, aren't you? I'm afraid not, she replied, her cheeks dimplingwith a wry smileThere's too much of the devil in me for that. Just how much devil, I grinned, are we talking about here?

And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.

Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.

A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.

In the storm-lit darkness, the beaded sweat and raindrops on her arm were like so many glittering stars, and her skin was like a span of night sky.

I love you because I choose you and I choose you because I love you.

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.

A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him.

We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting

hate has no literature: real fear and real hate have no words

One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.

The truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.

There are no mistakes. Only new paths to explore.

Food is music to the body, music is food to the heart.

Shantaram is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to Shantaram, the first a prequel.

Nobody who has done business in any country with an Indian would doubt the shrewdness of Indians, but what Indian people bring to the world is something special and unique, which is the capacity for a loving interaction.

The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.

And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.

Shantaram' is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to 'Shantaram,' the first a prequel.

Be true to love where ever you find it, and be true to yourself and everything that you really are.

People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that's why we fear it so much.

Once you love something, you can never stop loving it. Even after a divorce, the heart will not stop loving.

A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn't really that bad until someone tried to change it.

A man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. then he has to earn her respect. then he has to cherish her trust. and then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That's what it's all about. That's the most important thing in the world. That's what a man is, Yaar. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you do that, you're not a man.

A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you're not a man.

A politician is someone who promises a bridge even when there's no water

A wise man once told me- he's a muslim by the way- that he has more in common with a jew than he does a fanatic of his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or a Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic of his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a ration, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic of his own religion

Ask people for help. You'll be all right. Don't worry. It's a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun"¦

at first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. what we should fear and dread, of course, is that we wont stop loving them, even after they are dead and gone. for i still love you with the whole of my heart. i still love you. and sometimes, my friend, the love that i have and cant give to you, crushed the breast from my chest. soemtimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

but there's no nation uncorrupted. there's no system that's immune to the misuse of money.

Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Cowardece is often just another name for being taken by surprise.

Crime is stupid, lazy and weak. You can only exploit it and make money out of it.

Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, because the scorpion promises not to sting him. And then the scorpion stings the frog, half way across the river. The drowning frog asks him why he did it, when they'll both drown, and the scorpion says that he's a scorpion, and it's his nature to sting.

Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

Every virtuous act has some Dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.

Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.

Fanatics have the look of people who do not masturbate but who think about it almost all time.

Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them.

For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested and loyalty. But there is not test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love; the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing; the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.

Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.

Friendship is an Algebra test that nobody passes.

Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise.

Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun.

Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

I don't know what frightens me more

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare form heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

I take everything personally- that's what being a person is all about.

I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.

I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future.

I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.

I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke.

If we can't respect the way we earn it, money has no value. If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose.

If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?

If you make your heart into a weapon, you end up using it on yourself.

In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.

Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes.

Indians are the Italians of Asia and vice versa. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is the music inside the body and music is the food inside the heart. Amore or Pyar makes every man a poet, a princess of peasant girl if only for second eyes of man and woman meets.

It doesnt always help us to love the world,but it does prevent us from hating the world.

It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts.

It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

Justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.

justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.

Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count? Sixty, eighty, eighty people? Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans. Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. And from Bombay - Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamic for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousand of people? I will tell you - four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream.

Love is a one-way street. Love, like respect isn't something you get; it's something you give

Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.

Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever..

Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it's the other way around

Never let anyone know what you're thinking - always know what the other thinks of you.

None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn't enough.

nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn't meant to be.

Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch, as the skin of a woman's thigh. No flower, feather or fabric, can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in any other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It's a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.

Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything.

Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that he exists." Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.

One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward universal ultimate complexity?

Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.

Powerful people have no regrets.

Praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can't defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.

Silence is the tortured man's revenge.

Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.

So when will be the time to get on the train? I think.....a little bit almost quite very soon and not long.

Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again.

Some loves are like that. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, & your self-respect & independence. After a while you start throwing people out - friends, everyone you know. & it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, & you know it's going to take you down with it. I've seen that happen to a lot of people. I think that's why I'm sick of love. - Karla

Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things.

Some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you..

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn