ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.

I never could understand why some writers treat women as helpless. Every woman I know is strong in her own unique way.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

L' me humaine ne s'explique pas par la psychologie. Elle ne peut tre expliqu e, elle est vivre.

I am glad I have found a readership, but one can't write only what is likely to sell. A writer is not a shopkeeper.

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses

The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.

A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

To survive, you must tell stories.

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.