When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.

I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

My aunt used to say, "It's between me and my god; it's got nothing to do with you." It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it's a good way of putting it.

There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That's not going to go away. But that said, I think I'm cautiously optimistic that we're looking at a better future.