You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

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 profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

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

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.