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

I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in Americ….

Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we're doing, and the extent to which….

I think there is a lot of continuity between the Jewish and the Islamic traditions. We know this historically, though people don't want to talk about….

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 renewa….

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 dee….

I think of myself as a narrative artist. I don't think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of those modalities of processing a….

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

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 Je….

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad..

I feel like that religions generally ask the biggest questions. They may not always have the best answers, but they're the zone of human activity tha….

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

I've always felt a connection to kids who go to church. I think I'm fundamentally a religiously oriented and religiously minded person. It's very eas….

I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any poli….

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 p….

I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an….

I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes arou….

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was tr….

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

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human..

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