I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.

We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring.

The animosity between India and Pakistan is deeply unfortunate and dangerous, and it's something I've long campaigned to reduce. But right now, when there's artillery being exchanged in Kashmir - which is not for from here, either - and there are 100-ish nuclear weapons on each side of the border, there's never really been a case like this where two nuclear armed countries are happily shelling each other.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture.

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

Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.