I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.

We all owe death a life.

It seems to me it's perfectly possible to vehemently disagree with a piece of work and to say that it's offensive and insulting and so on and so on. And you're absolutely entitled to do that and to speak back, if you like, against that piece of speech with all the vehemence at your disposal. I mean, that's legitimate. Even other things. People have a right to demonstrate.

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.