Novel writing is solitary work.

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.

Pakistan now is like a horror film franchise. You know, it's 'Friday the 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist from Pakistan.' And each time we hear of Pakistan it's in that context.

You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.

My aunt used to say, "It's between me and my god; it's got nothing to do with you." It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it's a good way of putting it.

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.