I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

Novel writing is solitary work.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

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

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 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."