Mohsin Hamid Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“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