They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.

I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore...

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as...

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

The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.

Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you...

Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains...

Most Muslims do not ‘choose’ Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like...

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their...

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head...

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

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.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.

As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was ‘Asterix and Obelix’ and ‘Tin Tin’ comic books, or ‘Lord of the Rings,’ or Frank Herbert’s sci-fi. Or ‘The Wind in the Willows.’...

Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together,...

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings — younger, I later learned, than many of...

There are many cultural scenes in Lahore, just as there are in London. And there is a celebrity culture here, just as there is in London. But in Lahore, the celebrity scene doesn’t drown out...

How many big businesses don’t resort to underhand means?

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.

I think I’ve always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was ‘your’...

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

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is...

Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers...

The four places I’ve called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.

I felt suddenly very young – or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing...

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn’t mix, don’t mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes...

I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together.

Language lacks the power to describe Faith.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that… the reader is left with an echo of: ‘How much of this was from me?’

I think there’s really strong social stratification in South Asia.

When I’m writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

It seemed to me then – and to be honest, sir, seems to me still – that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain...

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.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with...

Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way – as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago – they find a way to just carry on. But you’re stressed out. You’re...

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of...

In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one...

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends...

Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.

I’d rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

Basically, asking me what kind of music I like is like asking what kind of food I like: ‘Anything that tastes good,’ is the answer. I’m the kind of guy who spends three times as...

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...