The animosity between India and Pakistan is deeply unfortunate and dangerous, and it's something I've long campaigned to reduce. But right now, when there's artillery being exchanged in Kashmir - which is not for from here, either - and there are 100-ish nuclear weapons on each side of the border, there's never really been a case like this where two nuclear armed countries are happily shelling each other.

We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.

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 felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

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

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.