The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.