I will say I am the sum of my books.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

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.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.