“All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.”

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

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.

For me, there’s a fine line between telling a story that’s fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it’s bloodless, a little too fictional.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

That is a huge part of my excitement, the fact that this generation will get such a beautifully-detailed introduction to a hero and icon that has largely lived in a few pages of our history books and in one-dimensional photographs.

I don’t think that you should be per­fectly candid and frank about the intimate details of your personal life with the public at large. Subsequently, it creates consider­able personal problems.

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.

May you find INSPIRATION in the big picture, but may you find LOVE in the details.

But little details like that is not what people are able to see, and that makes the world of difference to the outcome of the situation.

Echo of a Scream (1937).’ I got spun out by the way he creates tension and movement through the interlocking details in the painting.