Empathy Is About Finding Echoes

My Mother Has Been To Mecca To Perform Her Hajj; My Dad Hasn't. I Come From A Very Liberal Family, So Even The People Who Are Outwardly Religious Tend To Subscribe To Gender Equality, The Importance Of Open-mindedness, All That Stuff. My Family Is Generally Nonprescriptive.

In Pakistan, Many Of The Young People Read Novels Because In The Novels, Not Just My Novels But The Novels Of Many Other Pakistani Writers, They Encounter Ideas, Notions, Ways Of Thinking About The World, Thinking About Their Society That Are Different. And Fiction Functions In A Countercultural Way As It Does In America And Certainly As It Did In The, You Know, '60s.

If We Try To 'protect Ourselves', Our Nation-states Begin To Look Like Prisons.

Novel Writing Is Solitary Work.

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.