In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.

Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

...animals don't escape from somewhere but from something

But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.