You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.

I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.