To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come.
The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever.
When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.
By 2013, at the age of 29, I was failing. I had left two good jobs in succession to complete a novel I'd been tooling around with since 2009, had enrolled in a graduate programme in Texas, as far away from home as possible, to finish it - and yet: what did I have to show for it after five years of work?
Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.
I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling.
In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott.
Every time a blast happens, people ask, 'But why would someone do this?' Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere - neither in fiction nor non-fiction.
Terrorists are as torn as anyone else.
Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too.
I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.
It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by.
People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.
