All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all.

Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture.

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

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 fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.