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.

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

I think the idea of migration through time is very important because every human being does that and it unites us with people who migrate through geography.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.