Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.
We're living with the Arabs; we have to understand them... Through knowing the Arabs, you know yourself better.
Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.
I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently - his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh - and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs - not only politics but poetry - was very important; he took it as a vocation.
There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
I divide criticism into two categories - one coming from those who understand music, who are worthy of being critical because they are knowledgeable about what they are saying; and then there is another category of people who would criticise you anyway, whether your work is good or bad.
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
