Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.
I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.
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.
I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.
It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.
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 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.
Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn't another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.
In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.
There's a real, brutal nature to the capitalism practiced by the main character in 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.' And I think playing dirty is certainly part of that.
Pakistan now is like a horror film franchise. You know, it's 'Friday the 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist from Pakistan.' And each time we hear of Pakistan it's in that context.
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.
Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.
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.
I personally tend to believe that there is a right to migration, the same way there's a right to love whom you like and to believe what you believe and to say what you want to say.
I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.
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.
Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.
I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense.
It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.
Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way - as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago - they find a way to just carry on. But you're stressed out. You're worried, you know.
Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists.
I like the idea of an open, international London that thrives on attracting hard-working, talented people but has the confidence to tell them they must play by the same rules as everyone else.
One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.
Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment.
I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.
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.
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.
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.
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 US as a geopolitical player.
What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker.
Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.
A beard is something that is almost like a mirror to the viewer. When someone sees you wearing a beard, they're seeing something in their own imagination because it's still me whether I'm bearded or not.
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.'
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.
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.
think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.
I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.
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.
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.
I actually feel that personal matters, like religion and spirituality, are things that I really discuss only with intimates. I think it's, in a way, like sexuality, something where it touches upon something very private.
The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it's important for writers and artists to try to imagine that.
I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.
Chance plays a powerful role in every life - our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all; a few drops here or there matter enormously - but consequences often become more serious as income levels go down.
In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.
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.
But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.
My aunt used to say, "It's between me and my god; it's got nothing to do with you." It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it's a good way of putting it.
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.