“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.”

All cultures have been mingled forever.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

I’ve never abandoned the novel.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

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.

We had avoided discovery by the Sioux scouts, and we were confident of giving them a complete surprise.

To make discoveries, you have to be curious about why the universe is the way it is.

As you discover what strength you can draw from your community in this world from which it stands apart, look outward as well as inward. Build bridges instead of walls.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’

The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior.

Ben Franklin may have discovered electricity- but it is the man who invented the meter who made the money.

I wanna open every know of who “I should be” so I can elongate the rope, fly up higher and discover who I “could” be.

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.