Sometimes we are looking for somebody we can connect with on the basis of a shared past or a tradition or experience. And so finding that you're sitting next to someone very much like you in terms of where they come from is enormously reassuring.

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.

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

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.