Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.

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.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

I think the beard helps offset - it's the only hairstyle I can really pull off. But I'm often clean-shaven. I think, you know, for me, it's not that signifier. What's interesting to me though is although the beard isn't a signifier of that to me, other people very often think that it is. And so people in America might react differently. The, you know, border agents might react differently. The guys at airport security might react differently.

Like many of my friends in the Pakistani diaspora - and many of my friends in Pakistan itself, for that matter - I have sometimes looked at the country of my birth and wondered whether its future will be one of steady and sad decline.