When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional...
The blast wave that passed through my sister’s office doubtless passed through devout Muslims, atheist Muslims, gay Muslims, funny Muslims, and lovestruck Muslims—not to mention Pakistani Christians,...
She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.
Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a par...
Neither much enjoyed catching unexpected glimpses of their former lover's new existence online, and so they distanced themselves from each other on social networks, and while they wished to look out f...
I feel the illusion I’ve twirled around me like a sari start to come undone and fall to my feet.
Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered, or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.
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 fro...
To read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings,
She listened to me speak with a series of smiles, as though she were sipping at my descriptions and finding them to her taste
Saeed admired his foreman, the foreman having that sort of quiet charisma that young men often gravitate towards, part of which lay in the native man's not seeming the least interested in being admire...
Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, h...
I'm more unsettled than nervous. It's like I'm an oyster. I've had this sharp speck inside me for a long time, and I've been trying to make it more comfortable, so slowly I've turned it into a pearl.
I get in, and she turns the music down. It’s Nusrat, remixed and clubby, but damn good as always.
As he sat he felt the outside of her thigh, firm, against his, and she felt the outside of his, likewise firm, against hers. She said, Aren’t you going to take that off? She meant the black robe, whic...
That is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
One's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
Most of the battle. We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees.
End of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things,
And they fished and fished for hours, taking turns, but neither of them knew how to fish, or maybe they were just unlucky, and though they felt nibbles, they caught nothing, and it was as though they...