Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn’t another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals...

Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture.

Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent—admittedly in my own best interest—on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take...

As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It’s just a fact of life. For me it always has been.

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she’s there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

Pride tells me to give it back, but common sense tells pride to shut up, have a joint and relax. I shrug and put the note into my wallet.

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.

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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,...

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

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

Language lacks the power to describe Faith.

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...

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...