All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.

So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.