If you ask me what is the best good fortune in my life, of course I say that I have seen in my lifespan the Wall coming down, the reunification.

They see me all the time at Bayreuth and think I only like Wagner's music, and it's not true.

I will not talk to journalists about anything that does not concern my work as a scientist or lecturer.

I was studying chemistry, and this is a physically hard job because you are in the laboratory, you work hard, and you come home in the late afternoon or in the evening and you always needed a break.

I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges.

I've changed in my sympathies since I've become a mother myself. In high school I went through a period where I was close with my mom and had to break with her in order to find myself and come back. Since that was my experience, that's often what happens in my books.

For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor.

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.