…I am absolutely not someone who thinks that politics is separate from the most intimate details of people’s lives… - Kamila Shamsie

I tend to be an optimist about human nature but a political pessimist…I think we’re living in very, very scary times and we have to find ways of looking squarely at it and finding reasons for optimism.

I don’t have much time for the idea that art is some languorous thing on the sidelines, and that you have to wait 50 years before you address a subject…

The thing you know in the abstract, but which you have to see, is the vastness of the place and how little relationship one side of it has to another. Mostly, the landscape is just unbelievably beautiful. You do a lot of looking and not that much thinking.