Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.

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.

Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment.

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.

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."

My earliest memories are of watching Star Trek and MASH while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.