One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

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

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 will say I am the sum of my books.

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