“Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.”

I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.

I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.

From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

We are not saved in order to be a blessing to other people.

Turn your attention for a while away from the worries and anxieties. Remind yourself of all your many blessings.

Life is the same way. In order to attract more of the blessings that life has to offer, you must truly appreciate what you already have.

You are never used of God to bring blessing until God has opened your eyes and made you see things as they are.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

As I lift up my eyes to Him and accept it as coming from the throne of God for some great purpose of blessing to my own heart.

I feel like everyone who goes to The University of Texas is blessed and lucky to be there because they’re getting a chance to be as good as they can be.

To be able to thank Allah for a blessing is a blessing within itself.