So much of our conversation about love is possessive. "You are mine. And if you stop being mine, I will hate you." And so exploring non-possessive ideas of love and friendship is important. Which is not to say we should just break down monogamy, I'm not taking a simplistic point of view. But, in addition to these examples of possessive love that we already have so much of, let us also explore what examples of non-possessive love and affection mean.

If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

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.

I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.

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

I think fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.