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

Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture.

I think the most effective forms of critique are ones that establish a common ground for people to occupy, and then appeal to the best nature of people on that common ground.

For many people, there is an almost power to be found in prayer.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

I think that we live in a world - and this is something which living in Pakistan, perhaps, has taught me - and, you know, we live in a world where there is a constant feed from social media, the news, etc., of things that can scare us. And we become so anxious because human beings are meant - are designed to be sensitized to dangerous stuff.

think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.