In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

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.

You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.

Is birth always a fall?

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.