“Beauty itself is a painful convulsion in the heart, an abundance of vitality in the soul, and a mad chase undertaken by the spirit until it encounters the heavens.”

“I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.”

“I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.”

“God did not intend religion to be an exercise club.”

“I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.”

“Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.”

“It is an indication of truth's jealousy that it has not made for anyone a path to it, and that it has not deprived anyone of the hope of attaining it, and it has left people running in the deserts of perplexity and drowning in the seas of doubt; and he who thinks he has attained it, it dissociates itself from, and he who thinks he has dissociated himself from it has lost his way.”

“No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer”

“Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.”

“I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.”

“An anxious heart is like a string that's out of tune.”