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.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

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.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

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

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.