I Think That People Are Going To

Walking Is Very Good For Writers. There's Something Fundamentally Useful About Not Talking To Anybody, Not Looking At A Screen, And Being In Nature - Even If That Nature Is An Urban Environment.

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.

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.

In Some Contexts In Pakistan Maybe A Beard Is Negative. It Depends. And In Some Contexts In America Maybe A Beard Is Positive. I Think There's Certainly Lots Of Hipster Communities Where Having A Beard Makes Me Look A Little Bit Less Like A, You Know, Middle-aged Fuddy-duddy. And There's Some Places In Pakistan Where Having A Beard, You Know, Certain Corporate Contexts, Certain Social Contexts, Where It's Not An Advantage To Have A Beard.

If Your Book Is Set In The Plantation Days Of The Slave-owning South And You Write A Little Romance Between Two Slave Owners Without Acknowledging The System They Live, That's A Political Gesture.