Mohsin Hamid Quotes

• There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It’s hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Connection, Villages

• Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way – as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago – they find a way to just carry on. But you’re stressed out. You’re worried, you know.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Violent, Worried

• The four places I’ve called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in New York, Places

• There are many cultural scenes in Lahore, just as there are in London. And there is a celebrity culture here, just as there is in London. But in Lahore, the celebrity scene doesn’t drown out the rest quite so much.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Drown, Scenes

• Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Debated, Forum

• Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Town, Abroad

• Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Marathon, Continent

• Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven’t pushed yourself hard enough.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pleasure, Novel

• My grandparents used to pray five times a day, but they were quiet about their own thing. Completely liberal day by day; my grandmother was a social worker and my grandfather was an engineer, but they never talked about religion. My entire life I couldn’t remember one conversation I had with them about religion.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Quiet, Engineer

• My earliest memories are of watching ‘Star Trek’ and ‘MASH’ while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Memories, Chicken

• Most Muslims do not ‘choose’ Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lawyers, Doctors

• Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Overhead, Unnatural

• Like many of my friends in the Pakistani diaspora – and many of my friends in Pakistan itself, for that matter – I have sometimes looked at the country of my birth and wondered whether its future will be one of steady and sad decline.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Future

  Tags in Decline, Wondered

• Like many kids, I used to pretend all sorts of things. I would climb into a tree and imagine that I was on an island, that the grass below we was an ocean, that the leaves were the fins of sharks. Perhaps unlike many people, I never really stopped. I still have a childlike predisposition to fantasise and share my fantasies.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Grass, Climb

• It’s very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there’s a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political view.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Narrative

• It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America’s bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Neighbours, Starvation

• Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Suspicion, Importance

• In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven’t seen before.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Trying, Entertained

• In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Notions, Comprehend

• If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Corporate, Novel

Mohsin Hamid (81)

Birth:	1971
Nationality:	Pakistani
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

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