What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older.

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

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

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.

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

I think that things were getting really very bad a couple of years ago, and there's been a very significant change in response to that on the part of the security forces and the government, but particularly the army. And you see Pakistan actually fighting terrorism and terrorists in a much more wholehearted way than had been occurring previously. It's not anywhere close to over yet, but you've seen a big change in the antiterrorism campaign here.

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.