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

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" As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly. "

" 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. "

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

" Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Basically, asking me what kind of music I like is like asking what kind of food I like: 'Anything that tastes good,' is the answer. I'm the kind of guy who spends three times as much on his speakers as he does on his television. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable. "

" Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before: to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics, too. "

" 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. "

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

" We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. "