Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops - like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

I think that we live in a world - and this is something which living in Pakistan, perhaps, has taught me - and, you know, we live in a world where there is a constant feed from social media, the news, etc., of things that can scare us. And we become so anxious because human beings are meant - are designed to be sensitized to dangerous stuff.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

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

Well, one thing that has changed is the number of people killed by terrorists in Pakistan. Civilians killed has gone down really quite dramatically. There was a newspaper article here about a month ago that got big headlines which said that civilian deaths from terrorism were down something like 80 percent or 90 percent from their peak of two or three years ago.

We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.