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.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.