I don't want to be a Michael Moore-style artist, which is not to disparage Michael Moore. But he seems rather unsuccessful at winning people over who don't already agree with him.

Our countries are weaker: they cannot protect us from imported goods, they can't protect us from climate change, they cannot protect us from epidemics. These things cross borders. But the kind of cooperation that would protect us from those things was completely lacking and because of this there's been a backlash. People feel vulnerable.

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

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

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.

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

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.