Mohsin Hamid quotes - page 2

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

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

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

Novel writing is solitary work.

Mohsin Hamid

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

Mohsin Hamid

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.

Mohsin Hamid

Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture. (Mohsin Hamid)

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

'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

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

Mohsin Hamid

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

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

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

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

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

Mohsin Hamid

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