You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.

I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.

Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.