When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

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."

We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.

I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?

The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

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.