I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

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 . . .

Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.

India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist.

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.