Mohsin Hamid quotes - page 4

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)

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

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

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

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

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

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

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

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 US as a geopolitical player.

Mohsin Hamid

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

I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond - only younger, darker, and possibly better paid. (Mohsin Hamid)

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