Mohsin Hamid Quotes

• I’ve realized that it’s important to stop trying to think I’m any one thing. People are confused as to their identity and try to cling to one aspect of that identity to describe what they are: American, Republican, Muslim. These are really incomplete.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Describe, Confused

• I’m not a representative of Pakistan; I’m just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Representative, Example

• I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fell, Carol

• I think there’s a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cinema, Courage

• I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn’t mix, don’t mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don’t talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Statement, Novel

• I think I’ve always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was ‘your’ boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get ‘you.’

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Imaginary, Growing

• I don’t want to be a propagandist or say that Pakistan is just great. There are problems, but it is a much more complex place than we are given to believe.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Propagandists, Complex

• I like the idea of an open, international London that thrives on attracting hard-working, talented people but has the confidence to tell them they must play by the same rules as everyone else.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thrives, Talented

• I don’t want to be a Michael Moore-style artist, which is not to disparage Michael Moore. But he seems rather unsuccessful at winning people over who don’t already agree with him.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Agree, Disparage

• I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Received, City

• I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Depending, Features

• For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Trajectory, Trying

• For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain – some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Climbing, Quietly

• For a combination of reasons, and despite evident fondness for American products and individuals, my impression is that most Pakistanis have extremely negative views of the U.S. as a geopolitical player.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Impression, Evident

• Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Survive, Farmers

• Chance plays a powerful role in every life – our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all; a few drops here or there matter enormously – but consequences often become more serious as income levels go down.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Chemical, Consequences

• Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers coming from India and the Indian diaspora.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Indian, Sheer

• Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn’t another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Capitalism, Effect

• Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you’re in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you’re in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in… you’re exposed to people with more.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Village, Restaurant

• As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was ‘Asterix and Obelix’ and ‘Tin Tin’ comic books, or ‘Lord of the Rings,’ or Frank Herbert’s sci-fi. Or ‘The Wind in the Willows.’ Or ‘Charlotte’s Web.’

  Mohsin Hamid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rings, Wind

Mohsin Hamid (81)

Birth:	1971
Nationality:	Pakistani
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

Related Authors

• Catherine Marshall
• Hervé Le Tellier
• Ira Levin
• Max Beerbohm
• Amos Oz
• Barbara Taylor Bradford
• Joan Didion
• Andrew Vachss
• Loretta Chase
• John Steinbeck

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 21st April

Births

• 1970 - Nicole Sullivan
• 1864 - Max Weber
• 1966 - Michael Franti
• 1909 - Rollo May
• 1950 - Tony Danza

Deaths

• 1851 - James Barron
• 1930 - Robert Seymour Bridges
• 2000 - Al Purdy
• 1938 - Muhammad Iqbal
• 1924 - Marie Corelli