Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think. "

" I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book. "

" If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants. "

" Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years. "

" 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 same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others. "

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

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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?' "

" 'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing. "

" 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. "

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

" Literature helps us transcend ourselves. "

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

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

" 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 leaves were the fins of sharks. Perhaps unlike many people, I never really stopped. I still have a childlike predisposition to fantasise and share my fantasies. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 they never talked about religion. My entire life I couldn't remember one conversation I had with them about religion. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "