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" When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family. "

" In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "