Manto Quotes

“He catches the thieves that lie in the hearts of their pure and respectable wives. And he compares them to the purity in the heart of a whore in a brothel.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Manto: Selected Stories

“that ugly truth about Manto, the man: that for all his love of Indian multiplicity, he went to Pakistan. He even tried convincing Chughtai to go. ‘The future looks beautiful in Pakistan,’ he said to her, ‘We’ll be able to get the houses of people who’ve fled from there. It’ll be just us there. We’ll progress very quickly.’ When I read this, I had trouble holding the two Mantos in my mind. It seemed impossible that the creator of Manto, the narrator and fictional presence, so immersed in the variety of India, seeming so much to rejoice in it, should also be the author of that remark, with its sly wish for homogeneity, for the place where ‘It’ll be just us.’ Chughtai, for other reasons, was also disgusted.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Manto: Selected Stories

“Writers rarely set out to be national writers. They need small, intimate worlds, full of details; the macro scale of countries, especially those as wide and various as India, cannot be their direct material.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Manto: Selected Stories

“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.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Manto: Selected Stories