The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

Terror is glamour - not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there's something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.