Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Novel writing is solitary work.
What else is belief but direction?
Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.
I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.
I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.
When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?
Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.
A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.
If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.
I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past.
For many people, there is an almost power to be found in prayer.
I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.
I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself.
If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all.
Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.
Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.
Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
We are each of us composed of atoms, but equally, we are composed by time.
I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.
Walking is a meditative act. It's so rare that we allow ourselves just to be.
If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.
Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.
If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.
The ban on the burkini, which is basically a wetsuit, seems particularly ridiculous.
There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.
I'm pro-human. And I think recognizing the human nature of migration is very important.
It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
It's very contrary to the notion of what America is to imagine that we can stop migration.
Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.
We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.
I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.
And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
I think we need to radically reimagine the future - citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone.
The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.
All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.