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.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

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

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

Writers should provoke disagreement.