“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.”

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.

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.

Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks.

Born in poverty, he will take supreme power. He will bankrupt the country. Raising an army in the Milanese marches, he will drain Faenza and Florence of gold and people.

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.

On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars – Something good will come out of all things yet – And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There’s no need to say another word.

It was an act of bravery loving you. I’ve been dripping in gold ever since.

We were told that they wished merely to pass through our country. To seek for gold in the far west, Yet before the ashes of the council are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. His presence here is an insult to the spirits of our ancestors.

Despite all the silver of Diana and Mercury, their images will be found on the lake. For the sculptor looking for new clay, he and his people will be flooded with gold.

There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.