Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I'm pro-human. And I think recognizing the human nature of migration is very important. "

Related Quotes:

" When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist. "

" 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. "

" Being a writer is not the point. Writing is. "

" 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. "

" The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable. "

" 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 haven't pushed yourself hard enough. "

" 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. "

" 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 that there is a degree of petulance around President Trump and also a degree of sort of blundering incompetence, which is unlike most businesspeople. "

" Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state. "

" 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. "

" There's a real, brutal nature to the capitalism practiced by the main character in 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.' And I think playing dirty is certainly part of that. "

" 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 that the city always pulls me. "

" 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 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. "

" It's not that, living in Pakistan, I feel an enormous constraint on how I can write and what I can say; rather, I recognize that one has to navigate these things... Am I aware of things that one could say that would be risky or that could be dangerous? Certainly I'm aware of those things. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 are: American, Republican, Muslim. These are really incomplete. "

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

" 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 them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before. "

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

" 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, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto. "

" 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. "

" I am a fairly mongrelized person - you know I've been a migrant my whole life, and it's hard to think of myself as any pure one thing. And so I take it, I guess, very personally - this notion that migrants are bad and that mixing is bad and that people from other places are bad. "

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

" 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. "

" Literature helps us transcend ourselves. "

" 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. "