Saadat Hasan Manto > Quotes

“If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don't even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that's the job of dressmakers.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with:

"In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing....
Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“If a man has to make a woman the center of his love, why should he integrate animality into this sacred human emotion?...Is love incompelete without it?...Is love the name of physical excersize ?”
― saadat hasan manto

“I feel like I am always the one tearing everything up and forever sewing it back together.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“ज़माने के जिस दौर से हम गुज़र रहे हैं, अगर आप उससे वाकिफ़ नहीं हैं तो मेरे अफसाने पढ़िये और अगर आप इन अफसानों को बरदाश्त नहीं कर सकते तो इसका मतलब है कि ज़माना नाक़ाबिले-बरदाश्त है। मेरी तहरीर(लेखन) में कोई नुक़्स नहीं । जिस नुक़्स को मेरे नाम से मनसूब किया जाता है, वह दरअसल मौजूदा निज़ाम का एक नुक़्स है। मैं हंगामा-पसन्द नहीं हूं और लोगों के ख्यालात में हैज़ान पैदा करना नहीं चाहता। मैं तहज़ीब, तमद्दुन, और सोसाइटी की चोली क्या उतारुंगा, जो है ही नंगी। मैं उसे कपड़े पहनाने की कोशिश भी नहीं करता, क्योंकि यह मेरा काम नहीं, दर्ज़ियों का काम है ।”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“...and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“To tell you the truth, the world seemed full of sad people – those who slept on the uncovered stoops of shops as well as those who lived in high-rise mansions. The man who walks about on foot worries that he doesn’t have decent shoes to wear. The man who rides the automobile frets that he doesn’t have the latest model car. Every man’s complaint is valid in its own way. Every man’s wish is legitimate in its own right.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Naked Voices: Stories & Sketches

“You would have realized that it wasn't Mumtaz, a muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn't have killed the bastard in him; similarly, assuming that he was a Muslim, you wouldn't have killed his Muslimness, but him.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Toba Tek Singh: Stories

“A man remains a man no matter how poor his conduct. A woman, even if she were to deviate for one instance, from the role given to her by men, is branded a whore. She is viewed with lust and contempt. Society closes on her doors it leaves ajar for a man stained by the same ink. If both are equal, why are our barbs reserved for the woman?”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“We’ve been hearing this for some time now — Save India from this, save it from that. The fact is that India needs to be saved from the people who say it should be saved.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“Manto's take on Ismat:

"Ismat’s pen and tongue both run fast. When she starts writing, her ideas race ahead and the words cannot catch up with them. When she speaks, her words seem to tumble over one another. If sheenters the kitchen to show her culinary skill, everything will be in a mess. Being hasty by nature, she would conjure up the cooked roti in her mind even before she had finished kneading the dough. The potatoes would note yet be peeled although she would have already finished making the curry in her imagination. I feel sometimes she may just go into the kitchen andcome out again afer being satiated by her imagination.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“... इधर-उधर से कई अफ़सर दौड़े आए और उन्होंने देखा कि वह आदमी जो 15 बरस तक दिन-रात अपनी दाँगों पर खड़ा रहा था, औंधे मुँह लेटा है-उधर ख़ारदार तारों के पीछे हिंदुस्तान था, इधर वैसे ही तारों के पीछे पाकिस्तान ; दरमियान में ज़मीन के उस टुकड़े पर जिसका कोई नाम नहीं था, टोबा टेक सिंह पड़ा था.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“Dear God, master of the universe, compassionate and merciful: we who are steeped in sin, kneel in supplication before your throne and beseech you to recall from this world Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, who was a man of great piety. Take him away, Lord, for he runs away from fragrance and chases after filth. He hates the bright sun, preferring dark labyrinths. He has nothing but contempt for modesty but is fascinated by the naked and the shameless. He hates sweetness, but will give his life to taste bitter fruit. He will not so much as look at housewives but is in seventh heaven in the company of whores. He will not go near running waters, but loves to wade through filth. Where others weep, he laughs; and where others laugh, he weeps. Faces blackened by evil, he loves to wash with tender care to make visible their real features. He never thinks about you but follows Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed you.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“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

“Her pores were like those of an orange, its skin filled with juice, which, if you applied the slightest pressure, would squirt up into your eyes. She was that fresh.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Bombay Stories

“War has brought inflation even to the graveyard.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Bombay Stories

“For me, remembrance of things past has always been a waste of time, and what’s the point of tears? I don’t know. I’ve always been focussed on today. Yesterday and tomorrow hold no interest for me. What had to happen, did, and what will happen, will.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“Manto had earlier been prosecuted in Lahore for obscenity, and one of the words alleged to have been obscene was, “breasts”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“خالی پیٹ کا مذہب روٹی ہوتا ہے۔”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“To those men who say that women from “good families” must come into the world of cinema, I have this question: What is it that you mean by “good?” A woman, who honestly puts her wares on display, and sells them without an intention to cheat, is such a woman not virtuous?”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“Literature and film in my opinion are like saloons where bottles have no labels. I want to taste each one myself and figure out which is what. If I'm denied this by labelling, then my entertainment is considerably lessened.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“Look this is hardly fair. You sold me impure petrol at black-market price and not even one shop could be put to the torch.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition

“As a writer I find the relationship fascinating. Consider it. There is tension, and often unpleasantness, in both the union of man and woman, and of State and citizen. There is a great deal of hypocrisy too, but the relationship is not ever severed. The intercourse between State and citizens (it will be appropriate to call it forcible intercourse) also produces offspring as a marriage does. But frightening ones, like the “Safety Act and Ordinance”. Offspring that resemble their father, the State, more than the citizenry.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“The field that cannot feed even its tiller Burn down every stalk that stands on it.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“thought a glass of lassi would be refreshing. In the shop I noticed that the fan was on, but turned away from both customers and the owner. I was curious and asked why it was so. The owner glared at me and said: ‘Can’t you see?’ I looked. The fan was pointed in the direction of a poster of our great leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. I shouted, ‘Pakistan Zindabad!’ and left without the lassi. In front of a shop, a man”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

“Literature is a symptom of the state of a society”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“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