“I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.”

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.

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.

I think the most difficult part is being patient for good work to come. Sometimes, you feel like giving up if things don’t materialise in a short period of time.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

I’m not materialistic. I love clothes and all that stuff, but I don’t need it to live.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.

Where the eye is focused, there the imagination finds its raw material. The right focus must be won at immense cost and discipline. Train the eye to see the good, and the imagination will follow suit.

I’m not that materialistic. I like nice clothes and that, but I don’t spend lots of money on stuff. I’m not really into TV, I don’t have an iPod, I’ve got a gramophone.

How are you yet to learn? I don’t want grand gestures. I don’t want the world on a plate, the best life has to offer, material things or flashy gimmicks. I just want you with me.