We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It's not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected.