The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

A beard is something that is almost like a mirror to the viewer. When someone sees you wearing a beard, they're seeing something in their own imagination because it's still me whether I'm bearded or not.

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

You know, very often, if you look at the kinds of communications that they're getting in an ISIS recruiting video, the videos that, you know, that one hears of as radicalizing them, these are like action movies. And so in the sense, it's that by closing off the idea that young Muslims and particularly young Muslim men can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.

In some contexts in Pakistan maybe a beard is negative. It depends. And in some contexts in America maybe a beard is positive. I think there's certainly lots of hipster communities where having a beard makes me look a little bit less like a, you know, middle-aged fuddy-duddy. And there's some places in Pakistan where having a beard, you know, certain corporate contexts, certain social contexts, where it's not an advantage to have a beard.

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?'

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.