The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.