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

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

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.

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

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.