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

So much of our conversation about love is possessive. "You are mine. And if you stop being mine, I will hate you." And so exploring non-possessive ideas of love and friendship is important. Which is not to say we should just break down monogamy, I'm not taking a simplistic point of view. But, in addition to these examples of possessive love that we already have so much of, let us also explore what examples of non-possessive love and affection mean.

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.