The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.

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.

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.

The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.