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

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" I studied about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and about how the Constitution was written by men, many of whom were slave owners. So I suppose the travel ban strikes me as coming from an era I thought we'd left behind, but I guess we haven't entirely left it behind. "

" 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. "

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

" Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that in some senses could be thought of as traditionally American: The idea that everybody is equal; the idea that the rights of women and men should be the same. "

" 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.' "

" Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before: to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics, too. "

" When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different. "

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

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

" I'm not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it's in my comfort zone. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Novel writing is solitary work. "

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

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

" Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. "

" 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. "

" 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 are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion. "

" How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means? "

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

" Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable. "

" 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. "

" Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you're in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you're in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in... you're exposed to people with more. "

" If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy. "

" 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. "

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

" When the forces are aligning against hybridity, it harms everyone, as we are all migrants. Growing up in Pakistan, I know just how oppressive that kind of puritanical mindset can be. "

" 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. "

" 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 view. "