I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense.

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

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older.

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

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

Pakistan now is like a horror film franchise. You know, it's 'Friday the 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist from Pakistan.' And each time we hear of Pakistan it's in that context.

Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.