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

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" 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. "

" Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics. "

Characteristics

" We recognise that, with time, every human being will cease being, will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet, and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die. "

" 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 superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword. "

" Most Muslims do not 'choose' Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion. "

" Those of us who thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a pioneer of science fiction. "

" I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values. "

" There are many cultural scenes in Lahore, just as there are in London. And there is a celebrity culture here, just as there is in London. But in Lahore, the celebrity scene doesn't drown out the rest quite so much. "

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

" 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism. "

" In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there. "