If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

I personally want to "do" death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I'm dying, but so are you

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: "anima"-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.