My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.

And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available in whatever it is, close to 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the writer. And I'm happy to say the writer wasn't suppressed.

There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so but behind locked doors there are usually high emotions running.

They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.