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.

We can open up our computers and Skype with someone, and we see them. It's like looking through a window. And we can surf the internet through our phones, and it's like our consciousness is far away. Or we can step through a airplane door and be in another continent a few hours away. So technology feels, to me, like the doors sort of already exist, at least emotionally.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

I think wars, climate change, all that stuff is going to move people. And so I wanted to say, "What if the migration apocalypse occurs and it isn't an apocalypse at all?" Maybe we will still find ways to be happy and for our children and grandchildren to thrive and the world to move on.

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

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.