I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both -the library and my father- equally and without question.

...who I am to talk? I dream of rain.

From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

...never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own.

There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.

I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.

She understood love. What destroys you saves you, she had told me.

Although my father had never been there, I came to believe I would someday see that city for him.

Love may be harder to find in some people, but when they do love you know it must be something marvelous.

As I read the Qur’an and prayed the Islamic prayers, a door to my heart was unsealed and I was immersed in an overwhelming tenderness.

"The most powerful single idea in mathematics is the notion of a variable."

What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.

You can't fool an audience with lots of bits and pieces. You have to lead them somewhere.

No one can look at a pine tree in winter without knowing that spring will come again in due time.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it.

A person cooking is a person giving. Even the simplest food is a gift.