Mohsin Hamid Quotes

#1. Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honor the goodness of the men who raised them,

Mohsin Hamid

#2. I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

Mohsin Hamid

#3. It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.

Mohsin Hamid

#4. 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

#5. You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from?" I shook my head. "It comes from feeling out of place," he said. "Believe me. I know.

Mohsin Hamid

#6. ... and time is the stuff of which a self is made.

Mohsin Hamid

#7. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.

Mohsin Hamid

#8. It was a summer of great rumblings in the belly of the earth, of atomic flatulence and geopolitical indigestion, consequences of the consumption of sectarian chickpeas by our famished and increasingly incontinent subcontinent.

Mohsin Hamid

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that ... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

Mohsin Hamid

#12. The end of the world can be cozy at times.

Mohsin Hamid

#13. Basically, asking me what kind of music I like is like asking what kind of food I like: 'Anything that tastes good,' is the answer. I'm the kind of guy who spends three times as much on his speakers as he does on his television.

Mohsin Hamid

#14. stories of evil can be projected on them with as little difficulty as stories of good.

Mohsin Hamid

#15. Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.

Mohsin Hamid

#16. What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older ...

Mohsin Hamid

#17. The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'.
'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'.
'But it's a very good one. You can almost see colours.

Mohsin Hamid

#18. 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

#19. Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of ... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.

Mohsin Hamid

#20. 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

#21. When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

Mohsin Hamid

#22. but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. Saeed

Mohsin Hamid

#23. I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

Mohsin Hamid

#24. 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

#25. Novel writing is solitary work.

Mohsin Hamid

#26. I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

Mohsin Hamid

#27. She had bumped me out of the center of my world. I'd become a baby person, and it felt good, better than what had come before.

Mohsin Hamid

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Mohsin Hamid

#32. Didn't you tell me smoking ruined your stamina as a boxer?
...
Ruined is a strong word, I'd say.
...
It helps fight boredom. It gives you more to do and less time to do it in.

Mohsin Hamid

#33. Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent - admittedly in my own best interest - on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.

Mohsin Hamid

#34. 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

#35. She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.

Mohsin Hamid

#36. You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.

Mohsin Hamid

#37. I do not think that less is necessarily more. But I don't think that more is necessarily more either. - Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid

#38. What distinguishes the "war on terror" is that it is a war against a concept, not a nation. And the enemy concept, it seems to me, is pluralism.

Mohsin Hamid

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. He was a man who discovered love through his penis.

Mohsin Hamid

#42. Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimize the importance of the individual and maximize the importance of the group.

Mohsin Hamid

#43. Not - please understand me - that I was convinced that I had made a mistake; no, I was merely unconvinced that I had not made a mistake. I was, in other words, confused.

Mohsin Hamid

#44. And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

Mohsin Hamid

#45. People often ask me if I am the book's Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man's conversation with himself.

Mohsin Hamid

#46. when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

Mohsin Hamid

#47. America is our enemy; America should give us more aid.

Mohsin Hamid

#48. War would soon erode the facade of their building as though it had accelerated time itself, a day's toll outpacing that of a decade.

Mohsin Hamid

#49. I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.

Mohsin Hamid

#50. I tried not to dwell on the comparison; it was one thing to accept that New York was more wealthy than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well.

Mohsin Hamid

#51. Think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.

Mohsin Hamid

#52. 'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

Mohsin Hamid

#53. Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.

Mohsin Hamid

#54. 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

#55. When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional construct, but it also recognizes that thinking of itself as such might cause it to disintegrate.

Mohsin Hamid

#56. When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.

Mohsin Hamid

#57. The world will not fail if Pakistan fails, but the world will be healthier if Pakistan is healthy.

Mohsin Hamid

#58. Pride tells me to give it back, but common sense tells pride to shut up, have a joint and relax. I shrug and put the note into my wallet.

Mohsin Hamid

#59. Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.

Mohsin Hamid

#60. I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

Mohsin Hamid

#61. We are all migrants through time.

Mohsin Hamid

#62. But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

Mohsin Hamid

#63. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.

Mohsin Hamid

#64. But mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere, and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest to anyone but those directly involved.

Mohsin Hamid

#65. She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself.

Mohsin Hamid

#66. Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.

Mohsin Hamid

#67. The alliance between the US and Pakistan is thus predominantly between the US and the Pakistani military.

Mohsin Hamid

#68. Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

Mohsin Hamid

#69. They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.

Mohsin Hamid

#70. A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

Mohsin Hamid

#71. Pakistan now is like a horror film franchise. You know, it's 'Friday the 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist from Pakistan.' And each time we hear of Pakistan it's in that context.

Mohsin Hamid

#72. There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That's not going to go away. But that said, I think I'm cautiously optimistic that we're looking at a better future.

Mohsin Hamid

#73. Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

Mohsin Hamid

#74. 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

#75. Maximum return was the maxim to which we returned.

Mohsin Hamid

#76. When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Mohsin Hamid

#77. America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

Mohsin Hamid

#78. Nadia's experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did.

Mohsin Hamid

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically.

Mohsin Hamid

#82. 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

#83. A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery.

Mohsin Hamid

#84. Human beings don't necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.
It's a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves.

Mohsin Hamid

#85. If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.

Mohsin Hamid

#86. No believer is a bad believer.

Mohsin Hamid

#87. when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography

Mohsin Hamid

#88. [O]ver sufficiently long a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.

Mohsin Hamid

#89. Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

Mohsin Hamid

#90. When my turn came, I said I hoped one day to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability; the others appeared shocked, and I was forced to explain that I had been joking.

Mohsin Hamid

#91. Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.

Mohsin Hamid

#92. (A revolver is) just a tool, really, like stapler. A stapler that punch through a person. Pin them. Drive blunt metal through flesh and bone.

Mohsin Hamid

#93. The privileged liberal position: There should be equal rights for all; I should not have to share my riches with the poor.

Mohsin Hamid

#94. 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

#95. Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.

Mohsin Hamid

#96. 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

#97. I think the most effective forms of critique are ones that establish a common ground for people to occupy, and then appeal to the best nature of people on that common ground.

Mohsin Hamid

#98. Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

Mohsin Hamid

#99. [ ... ] I stated to them among other things that no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.

Mohsin Hamid

#100. I have this thing about friends and secrets. Sometimes when I meet a person I like, I tell them a secret they don't know me well enough to be told. It lets me judge their potential as a friend.

Mohsin Hamid