To me, family is everything. I want children to realize how important their families are and what a support system a family is.

Anyone who has problems, or worries, anyone who laughs and cries, anyone who feels can write. It's only talking on paper... talking about the things that matter to us.

I loved teaching. It was my world. I only left because I was overwhelmed with three careers - teaching, writing, and my family.

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.

Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.

Many times in my life I've been upset about something and said to myself, "Will this matter in two years?" Not even in two months.

I myself was terrified during the Second World War. The war started when I was six, and I was so sure that we were going to be bombed and killed. My imagination is my biggest plus and my worst minus.

I have no special talent, you know. I never took a writing course before I began to write.

Outside of family, writing is essential. To me, it's like breathing.

I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.

All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.

Do what you can with all love and passion irrespective of whether it pays you well or not. Joy in the result lives longer than the joy in the reward.

Loveyoubye

That's when I realize how much I don't want to be alone, how sobbing should not be a solitary sport..

And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

I will take back Kashmir, all of it, and I will not leave behind a single inch of it because, like the other provinces, it belongs to Pakistan.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

We are always making more and more stuff in the world. You know; big buildings, big planes, big boats and that. Will we ever get to a point where all this is too heavy for the world to handle?

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I'm animated.

You can't be striving to please; you must be striving to get to the heart of the matter.