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

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

Living in a place like Pakistan, very often you meet people who are migrating abroad. And sometimes you'll ask their parents, you know - you didn't try to stop them? Like, why didn't you say, don't go - I'll miss you? Stay with me. And, you know, people say, well, it's best for them. They have to go. And parents, you know, take on that sadness because they know it's better for their children if they leave.

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

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