If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

For a combination of reasons, and despite evident fondness for American products and individuals, my impression is that most Pakistanis have extremely negative views of the US as a geopolitical player.

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

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

Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.

I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.