Mohsin Hamid

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

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.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

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.

I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

I think that when we take the long view, the notion that some people are deemed less worthy of being able to move - to not have the right to cross borders - over time, that's going to seem as outmoded and as unfair, really, as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination.

It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America's bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword.

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.

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.

In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

It's not that, living in Pakistan, I feel an enormous constraint on how I can write and what I can say; rather, I recognize that one has to navigate these things... Am I aware of things that one could say that would be risky or that could be dangerous? Certainly I'm aware of those things.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

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'm not a representative of Pakistan; I'm just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally.

When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that in some senses could be thought of as traditionally American: The idea that everybody is equal; the idea that the rights of women and men should be the same.

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.