Marriage is definitely a very comforting feeling.

Classroom singing is common in India, but no one gives you marks for that. My idea is to introduce music and singing as full-fledged subject so that talent can be polished at an early stage. Also, it will help alleviate stage fear.

Music is part of our culture.

Though I did M.Sc. from Dharamshala, I was always attracted towards music.

I would love to compose for an entire film because it will be a different experience.

When you are travelling, there's romance, and there's music.

I don't think Bollywood is my ultimate destination; I believe it's a part of my journey.

I don't see my singing for films as a transition from singing my own songs because I see it as part of the same picture.

When I sing, I try to make the song my own and sing it my way because, in my mind, I am not following any school of thought. I just make myself free.

I want to visit Moscow again and again in my life.

Be aware and hold the government accountable.

I love singing for films because there is a story to the song; it takes you down a new road.

I started my journey with 'Dooba Dooba.'

My wedding was a very private affair for close family and friends, so I had decided to hold a reception in my native town.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.

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.

Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn't another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.

I think we need to radically reimagine the future - citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone.

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.

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

The four places I've called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.

The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable.

We are each of us composed of atoms, but equally, we are composed by time.

My earliest memories are of watching 'Star Trek' and 'MASH' while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.

Like many kids, I used to pretend all sorts of things. I would climb into a tree and imagine that I was on an island, that the grass below we was an ocean, that the leaves were the fins of sharks. Perhaps unlike many people, I never really stopped. I still have a childlike predisposition to fantasise and share my fantasies.

I think the most effective forms of critique are ones that establish a common ground for people to occupy, and then appeal to the best nature of people on that common ground.

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

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.

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

I think that there is a degree of petulance around President Trump and also a degree of sort of blundering incompetence, which is unlike most businesspeople.

Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before: to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics, too.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

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.'

When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.

Basically, asking me what kind of music I like is like asking what kind of food I like: 'Anything that tastes good,' is the answer. I'm the kind of guy who spends three times as much on his speakers as he does on his television.

Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.

I'm not a representative of Pakistan; I'm just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally.

Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

Those of us who thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a pioneer of science fiction.

As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television.

If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active.

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

My grandparents used to pray five times a day, but they were quiet about their own thing. Completely liberal day by day; my grandmother was a social worker and my grandfather was an engineer, but they never talked about religion. My entire life I couldn't remember one conversation I had with them about religion.

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.