Mohsin Quotes

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

Mohsin Hamid

#2. And also I think the rise of other, you could say, destinations for international jihadis mean that Pakistan isn't necessarily the place where people from all over the world who want to engage in these activities gravitate to. They're going now to places like Syria or Yemen Libya, elsewhere.

Mohsin Hamid

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. ambitious cleric position: "Religion makes us all equal; only I decide what religion says.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

#9. 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

#10. It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.

Mohsin Hamid

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

#16. In Pakistan, my friends and family are frightened, as they should be when the

Mohsin Hamid

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

#23. As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.

Mohsin Hamid

#24. Novel writing is solitary work.

Mohsin Hamid

#25. 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

#26. And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

Mohsin Hamid

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. '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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

Mohsin Hamid

#33. 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

#34. But I must admit that my motives were no entirely noble; there were in me at least some elements of the anger and hurt vanity that characterize a spurned lover, and these unworthy sentiments helped me to keep my distance.

Mohsin Hamid

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. It reveals opinions and attitudes that are malleable, showing the plasticity of what in any given present moment one typically presents as a rock of certainty.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

#40. 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

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

Mohsin Hamid

#42. 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

#43. What else is belief but direction?

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

#45. But surely it is the gist that matters; I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you - an American - will agree, it is the thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's details.

Mohsin Hamid

#46. When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.

Mohsin Hamid

#47. 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

#48. You see, it is my passionately held belief that the right to possess property is at best a contingent one. When disparities become too great, a superior right, that to life, outweighs the right to property. Ergo, the very poor have the right to steal from the very rich.

Mohsin Hamid

#49. Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

Mohsin Hamid

#50. 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

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

Mohsin Hamid

#52. 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

#53. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books ...

Mohsin Hamid

#54. 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

#55. Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that - in my humble opinion - allows us to put the present into much better perspective.

Mohsin Hamid

#56. 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

#57. flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and kill Pakistani citizens.

Mohsin Hamid

#58. In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.

Mohsin Hamid

#59. Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops - like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

Mohsin Hamid

#60. Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

Mohsin Hamid

#61. 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

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

Mohsin Hamid

#63. I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.

Mohsin Hamid

#64. How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?

Mohsin Hamid

#65. 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

#66. I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.

Mohsin Hamid

#67. most powerful military in the world is sent to do a task best accomplished by schoolteachers, police forces, persuasion, and time.

Mohsin Hamid

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.

Mohsin Hamid

#71. The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

#73. 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

#74. Some men drink the blood of other men, all I drink is wine.

Mohsin Hamid

#75. 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

#76. One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.

Mohsin Hamid

#77. You have reminded me of how alien I found the concept of acquaintances splitting the bill when I first arrived in your country. I had been raised to favour mutual generosity over mathematical precision in such matters; given time both work equally well to even a score.

Mohsin Hamid

#78. It is the effect of scarcity; one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

Mohsin Hamid

#79. Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through

Mohsin Hamid

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

#84. 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

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

Mohsin Hamid

#86. 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

#87. Glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously ...

Mohsin Hamid

#88. The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they're not particularly fattening. So don't share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.

Mohsin Hamid

#89. What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.

Mohsin Hamid

#90. When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.

Mohsin Hamid

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

Mohsin Hamid

#94. Darashikoh was inside, for all the world a tastefully dressed patron of the shop, but he carried death in his undershorts and hunger in his heart.

Mohsin Hamid

#95. 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

#96. 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

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

Mohsin Hamid

#98. 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

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

Mohsin Hamid

#100. 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