If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over