Where to Begin
Metadata
Highlights
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The genuine artists will bring human warmth and longing and complexity to what is two-dimensional in other, lesser hands.
- it did what a reader like me, and a writer like me, wishes a work of art to be: this novel knew that literature is a public act,
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I never think of a reader when I am writing. It’s not that I am not trying to connect with anyone. My writing is an exploration of my own life, the workings of my own consciousness and my place in the wider world. But I do always begin with the conviction that there is nothing extraordinary or special about me. I am one of billions of people on this planet. So if something is true of me, then there is every likelihood that it is true of billions of others. I must find what I have in common with others. Not what sets me apart.
- So how to write about Pakistan (or Iran, Spain, USA, Argentina or the UK )? Always begin with the conviction that there is nothing special or extraordinary about you.