I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of life, and those are an important part of my childhood and my identity.

The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.

Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.

The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

The young princess was as beautiful as daylight. She was more beautiful even than the queen herself

I'm not a pacifist. I feel that there are situations where fighting is inescapable, but we don't go looking for those things.

Fine cooking is when the things you have cooked taste as they are

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.

Patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself.

There are so many projects that don't happen, just sometimes they don't get announced, so no one ever knows about them and you don't have to talk about them.

The God which cannot give me food in this world, cannot give me Heaven in the other world