“Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.”

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

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.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.

Do what you will, this life’s a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.

Stranger than fiction is the fiction that you are a stranger to me.

The identity that we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one, established by the mind, not a peculiar nature belonging to what we’re talking about.