When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.