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" 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. "

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" I think we need to radically reimagine the future - citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

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

" Novel writing is solitary work. "

" I think that when we take the long view, the notion that some people are deemed less worthy of being able to move - to not have the right to cross borders - over time, that's going to seem as outmoded and as unfair, really, as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination. "

" 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. "

" 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 it starts to become something. "

" When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response. "

" Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture. "

" I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" It's very contrary to the notion of what America is to imagine that we can stop migration. "

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

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

" 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. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active. "

" 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. "

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

" Novels are make-believe and play for adults. "

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