“My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.”

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

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.

Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

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

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.

All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

Live your life by a compass, not a clock.

Many of the most successful men and women in the world never graduated from college. They attended the school of life instead.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

Difficulties can’t be eliminated from life. Individuals will always have them, countries will always have them. The only thing is to accept them, if possible overcome them, otherwise to come to terms with them. It’s all right to fight, yes, but only when it’s possible.

You can prosper, no matter what the economy is doing.

From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity; we must become simple in our inward life and in our outward needs.