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

If the dominant political expression that we're seeing right now is of nostalgia and we know that nostalgia won't really work out, what happens is, we become depressed as individuals and societies - when we're depressed, we're much more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by demagogues and xenophobes.

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

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

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?'

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.