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.
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.
The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past.
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 take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
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 am a fairly mongrelized person – you know I’ve been a migrant my whole life, and it’s hard to think of myself as any pure one thing. And so I take it, I guess, very personally – this notion that migrants are bad and that mixing is bad and that people from other places are bad.
I think we need to radically reimagine the future – citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone.
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.
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.
We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet, and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die.
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.
When I’m writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.
When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.
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.
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.
If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.
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