Mohsin Hamid quotes

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Echoes #Empathy #Persons

If you have ever, sir, been through a breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh as if seen for the first time then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Breakup #Regret #Love You

There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Miracle #Language #Reason

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

#Assassins #Imagine #Should

Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Moving #One Direction #Remember

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Beautiful #Ruins #Building

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Past #Uncertain #Uncertain Future

What else is belief but direction?
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Belief

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Writing #Childhood #Gone

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

#Book #People #Way

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Terrorism #Natural #Strikes

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

#Player #Views #Negative

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

#Cousin #Uncles #Aunt

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

#Winning #Artist #People

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

#Hard Work #Play #Ideas

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

#Growing Up #Character #Thinking

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

#Senior #Couple #Writing

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

#New York #Home #Cities

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

#Dirty #Men #White

When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Tourists #Nomad #Feels

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Growing Up #Boys #Poverty

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

#Thinking #Cities #Looks

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Love #Struggle #Book

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

#Reading #Book #Different

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

#Years #Cities #Rivers

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

#Book #Character #Dark

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Reader

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

#Children #Book #Wind

I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Strong #Moving #Thinking

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Book #Taj Mahal #Painting

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

#America #Years #Half

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Strong #Thinking #Asia

I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Writing #Silence #Needs

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

#Thinking #Self #Links

If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Self #Imagine #Easy

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Book #Writing #Years

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Growing Up #Shadow #Pakistan

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Home #Language

How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Mean #Bigs #Resorts

I'm not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it's in my comfort zone.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Vanity #Guy #Comfort

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

#America #World #Arms

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

#Book #Echoes #Ambiguity

The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Actors #World #Pakistan

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

#Hands #Facts #Facts Of Life

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Thinking #Encounters #Should

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

#Wife #Soldier #Perception

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Writing

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

#Land #Interesting #Comedian

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Self #Humanity #Brain

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

#Powerful #Play #Personality

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

#Art #Writing #Self

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

#Flower #Animal #Mating

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

#Thinking #People #Common

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

#Real #Hands #Groups

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Suicide #Memories #Addiction

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Running #Stars #Fall

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Distance #Epic #Shining

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

#Believe #Guy #Feelings

She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Struggle #Currents

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

#Mean #Thinking #Rude

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

#Eye #Circles #Lasts

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

#Dark #Black And White #Rocks

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

#Country #Pakistan #Diaspora

I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Moon #Journey #Invisible

I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Age #Young

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me? As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Beautiful #Husband #Son

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Writing #Novel #Invitations

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

#Charity #Addresses #Poverty

Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Thinking #Networking #Dollars

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

#Fruit #Share #Fattening

If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Differences

Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Falling In Love #Heart #First Love

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

#Bird #Flying #Maps

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

#Law #Our Society #Capitalism

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

#Media #Numbers #Diaspora

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Literature #Helping

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Race #Islam #Racist

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Writing #Novelists

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

#War #America #Support

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

#Fall #Color #Years

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

#Friday #Pakistan #Horror

I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Memories #Believe #Hypocrite

As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Pain #War #Differences

I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Believe #Book #Years

It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Scarcity #Thirst #Propriety

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Father #Son #Gun

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.
-- Mohsin Hamid

#Country #School #Play