Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment.

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.

I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?

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

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.