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.
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.
I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together.
How many big businesses don’t resort to underhand means?
Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
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.
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.
And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she’s there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
I felt suddenly very young – or perhaps I felt my age.
Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.
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.
It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.
Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.
Why the brevity? Because I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through.
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.
If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren’t differences at all.
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.
The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.
I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.