When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.

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.

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

Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers coming from India and the Indian diaspora.

You know, you get a bad review as a writer, you remember it for 10 years. You get a hundred good reviews, you forget them all. You say hello to a hundred people in the city and it doesn't mean anything to you. One racist comment passes by, and it sticks with you a decade.

I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.

We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.