I Don't Know If I'm Truly At

In Pakistan, Many Of The Young People Read Novels Because In The Novels, Not Just My Novels But The Novels Of Many Other Pakistani Writers, They Encounter Ideas, Notions, Ways Of Thinking About The World, Thinking About Their Society That Are Different. And Fiction Functions In A Countercultural Way As It Does In America And Certainly As It Did In The, You Know, '60s.

I Really Do Believe That People Surprise You. And One Of The Powerful Things About Novels Is That They're About Characters, And Those Characters Live Their Lives.

I Feel Engaged With Young People In Pakistan. But That Said, It's Still A Small Minority That Reads Novels, Literary Fiction. But It Isn't Necessarily A Small Minority Of The Wealthy Elite In The City Of Lahore. It Can Often Be And I Often Do Meet At Literary Festivals Students Who've Ridden A Bus 12 Hours From A Very Small Town Just To Hear Some Of Their Favorite Writers Come And Speak.

Readers Don't Work For Writers. They Work For Themselves.

Well, One Thing That Has Changed Is The Number Of People Killed By Terrorists In Pakistan. Civilians Killed Has Gone Down Really Quite Dramatically. There Was A Newspaper Article Here About A Month Ago That Got Big Headlines Which Said That Civilian Deaths From Terrorism Were Down Something Like 80 Percent Or 90 Percent From Their Peak Of Two Or Three Years Ago.