I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

The world is always in movement.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

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

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.