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.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.