The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

Novel writing is solitary work.

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 was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.