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 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.
When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops – like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.
When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
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.
Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.
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 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.
Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.
Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
I believe one can gauge a book’s impact only after about 10 years.
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 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’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.
If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.
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.