I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.

The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'. 'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'. 'But it's a very good one. You can almost see colours.

When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.

When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.

Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.