It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.

If an American teenager were to come to Lahore, they'd have wildly different experiences depending on whom they met. They could party and get drunk and smoke hashish with some, while others would say, "Let's get some religious instruction."

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

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

How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?