“The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.”

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

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

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

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.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

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

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

The writer is all alone.

Grieve not; though the journey of life be bitter, and the end unseen, there is no road which does not lead to an end.

Whoever lives as he sees fit will not die as he sees fit.

Nothing separates a woman or a family from God’s love. Not death, and certainly not divorce.

What can you do with me? My jannah is in my heart! If you take me to jail, I will make zikr of Allah. If you exile me out of my land, I will make takaffur. If you execute me, I would be a shaheed. What can you do with me? Because I am not limited to this dunya. I am living for al-akhira!

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate, and set proud death beneath his feet, can look fortune in the face, unbending both to good and bad; his countenance unconquered.

Think not I dread to see my spirit fly, Through the dark gates of fell mortality; Death has no terrors when the life is true; ‘Tis living ill that makes us fear to die.

If you look around, you can find a face of God in each thing, because He is not hidden in a church, in a mosque, or a synagogue, but everywhere. As there is no one who lives after seeing him, there is also no one dying after seeing him. Who finds Him, stays forever with him.

And no renown can render you well-known: For if you think that fame can lengthen life By mortal famousness immortalized, The day will come that takes your fame as well, And there a second death for you awaits.