Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

I have always been interested in writing about happiness, in large part because it’s extremely difficult to do. The French writer Henry de Montherlant famously said, “Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches.”

he did not think of himself as white, because white was the color of people who didn’t think it was important to think about their color, because they were just people; color was for other people to think about, people who weren’t just people.