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

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.

I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.

Our countries are weaker: they cannot protect us from imported goods, they can't protect us from climate change, they cannot protect us from epidemics. These things cross borders. But the kind of cooperation that would protect us from those things was completely lacking and because of this there's been a backlash. People feel vulnerable.

Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal.

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

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