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.