I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.

I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense.

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.

I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back.

Our bodies were printed as blank pages to be filled with the ink of our hearts

Behind the depressing silence of the sea, the silence of God …. the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.

Valuable lessons were code words for pain that no one apologized for.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

Reform is a work of time; a national taste, however wrong it may be, cannot be totally changed at once.

For me, the key to longevity - and immortality, in a sense - has to do with transformation.

Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives as to improve them.

Getting older is the best thing that ever happened to me. I wake up every morning rejoicing that I'm still here with an opportunity to begin again and be better

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child... eventually.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.