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.

There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That's not going to go away. But that said, I think I'm cautiously optimistic that we're looking at a better future.

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

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

India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist.

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

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