I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives.

Well, one thing that has changed is the number of people killed by terrorists in Pakistan. Civilians killed has gone down really quite dramatically. There was a newspaper article here about a month ago that got big headlines which said that civilian deaths from terrorism were down something like 80 percent or 90 percent from their peak of two or three years ago.

America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment.

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.

If my daughter wanted to wear a headscarf and dress in a religiously conservative way, I would be heartbroken. But if she were to decide to do that and she were to live in a place where people said she couldn't do that, I would be entirely committed to her right to do so.

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