They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.