My earliest memories are of watching Star Trek and MASH while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.

The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet.

As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'

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.

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."

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.