It was a summer of great rumblings in the belly of the earth, of atomic flatulence and geopolitical indigestion, consequences of the consumption of sectarian chickpeas by our famished and increasingly incontinent subcontinent.

It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America’s bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a...

My earliest memories are of watching ‘Star Trek’ and ‘MASH’ while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.

A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism, which was defined to refer only...

Didn’t you tell me smoking ruined your stamina as a boxer? …Ruined is a strong word, I’d say….It helps fight boredom. It gives you more to do and less time to do it in.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

I don’t know if I’m truly at home in any language.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It’s hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.

…status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain – some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then...

I’ve realized that it’s important to stop trying to think I’m any one thing. People are confused as to their identity and try to cling to one aspect of that identity to describe what they...

Time is our most precious currency. So it’s significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the...

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don’t intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

I don’t listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.

What happens is my mind starts to go in circles, thinking and thinking, and then I can’t sleep. And once a couple of days go by, if you haven’t slept, you start to get sick....

Chance plays a powerful role in every life – our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all; a few drops here or there matter enormously – but consequences often become more serious as...

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

For a combination of reasons, and despite evident fondness for American products and individuals, my impression is that most Pakistanis have extremely negative views of the U.S. as a geopolitical player.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy’s sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had...

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated....

Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.

But it wasn’t the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn’t feel any passion to write about the place. I...

Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.

I think there’s a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we’re drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.

Novel writing is solitary work.

The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood’. ‘How would you know?’ Asks Sindhi cap. ‘You only have a black and...

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the...

‘Which is stronger, politics or love?’ is like asking, ‘Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?’ They are two sides of the same thing.

I don’t want to be a propagandist or say that Pakistan is just great. There are problems, but it is a much more complex place than we are given to believe.

You see, it is my passionately held belief that the right to possess property is at best a contingent one. When disparities become too great, a superior right, that to life, outweighs the right to...

I think there’s a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper...

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

The poets say some moths will do anything out of love for a flame[…]The moth takes off again, and we both step back, because he’s circling at eye level now and seems to have lost...

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I’m pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense...

Like many kids, I used to pretend all sorts of things. I would climb into a tree and imagine that I was on an island, that the grass below we was an ocean, that the...

Pakistan hasn’t been cast in the role of… interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.

My grandparents used to pray five times a day, but they were quiet about their own thing. Completely liberal day by day; my grandmother was a social worker and my grandfather was an engineer, but...

I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion,...

I like the idea of an open, international London that thrives on attracting hard-working, talented people but has the confidence to tell them they must play by the same rules as everyone else.

No believer is a bad believer.

I’m not a representative of Pakistan; I’m just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally.

It’s very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there’s a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political...

Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World’s Club...

[…] I stated to them among other things that no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.