In America there are people advocating for trans rights and people like Vice President Pence, who is vehemently opposed. In Pakistan, too, you have all kinds of folks - from flamboyant gay fashion designers and female Air Force pilots to the Taliban. A cross-dressed man used to be the top TV talk show host. It was actually quite radical. So the diversity of these societies is often lost on people.

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."

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me? As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has.

If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.

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.

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

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.