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.

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past.

I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.

Working on films where the money's more important than the creativity, I just get a bit freaked out by that. I just don't feel comfortable.

Politics, where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.

I can find some part of me that relates to even the most evil characters. At least in my imagination.