Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.
Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.
I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together.
I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.
I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.
When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.
In a way, every parent is sort of dependent on the benevolence of the society around them to take care of their children.
When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.
Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.
Those of us who thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a pioneer of science fiction.
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.
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.
The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet.
Which is stronger, politics or love? is like asking, Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling? They are two sides of the same thing.
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?'
Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.
If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active.
The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.
When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.
Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal.
You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.
'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.
I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.
I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?
I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.
India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist.
You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from?" I shook my head. "It comes from feeling out of place," he said. "Believe me. I know.
It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back.
It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .
I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.
We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.
We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
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.
America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture.
My earliest memories are of watching Star Trek and MASH while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.
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.
I think the idea of migration through time is very important because every human being does that and it unites us with people who migrate through geography.
The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.
My earliest memories are of watching 'Star Trek' and 'MASH' while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
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 think that there is a degree of petulance around President Trump and also a degree of sort of blundering incompetence, which is unlike most businesspeople.
We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring.
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.
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.
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.
I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives.