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 poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.

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 people of any faith, are born into their religion.

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 addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

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 from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my...

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.’ Or ‘Charlotte’s Web.’

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 it thinks.

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 the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older…

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 the rest quite so much.

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’ boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get ‘you.’

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 not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite’s sense of realpolitik but also with the American public’s own sense...

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 coming from India and the Indian diaspora.

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 a suit in a city not of his birth.

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 from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don’t talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

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 that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own...

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 it.

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 worried, you know.

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 the earth’s spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty...

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 is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there.

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 to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves.

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 much on his speakers as he does on his television.

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...

I think the most effective forms of critique are ones that establish a common ground for people to occupy, and then appeal to the best nature of people on that common ground.

Like many of my friends in the Pakistani diaspora – and many of my friends in Pakistan itself, for that matter – I have sometimes looked at the country of my birth and wondered whether its future will be one of steady and sad decline.

I commit her to memory. When I’m alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he’s ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there’s nothing I can do to...

Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they’d die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most...

If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.

I believe one can gauge a book’s impact only after about 10 years.

I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

Pakistan now is like a horror film franchise. You know, it’s ‘Friday the 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist from Pakistan.’ And each time we hear of Pakistan it’s in that context.