I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.

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."

You know, you get a bad review as a writer, you remember it for 10 years. You get a hundred good reviews, you forget them all. You say hello to a hundred people in the city and it doesn't mean anything to you. One racist comment passes by, and it sticks with you a decade.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.

The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want.