It's patently impossible for a Muslim character to represent 'all Muslims.'

I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.

Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies.

The first comic I ever read was an 'X-Men' themed anti-smoking PSA they gave out in health class when I was about 10.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward.

I've wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job.

'Lost' makes a lot of sense to me, philosophically.

To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.

The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.

A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.

'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler.

It took me a long time to square with the fact that none of my experiences are typical - I'm not a typical American, but I'm also not a typical Muslim.

The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.

I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.

'Lost' seems to be the inverse of 'Air': It explores dispossession and identity by forcing a bunch of people into one invented landscape instead of using many invented landscapes to keep people apart.

Leaving your country at a tender age really rearranges the way you perceive the world. So I feel marginally attached to many places rather than deeply attached to any one place.

I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.

We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'

There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.

We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small - the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you.

The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.

The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.

For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.

The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.

An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.

The Qur'an is God's property, not mine.

Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.

In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.

Muslims are ordinary members of the working public, just like you.

I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.

I don't think there's something inherently irreligious about comics.

There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.

Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.

My faith did not require beauty or belonging - the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all.

Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism.

Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.

My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing.

Real tolerance means respecting other people even when they baffle you and you have no idea why they think what they think.

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.

Out-marriage is an issue religious groups have been wrestling with for some time. Of course men and women fall in love. Of course it's not always convenient to their respective cultural and spiritual norms.