Mohsin Hamid quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mohsin Hamid on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.

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

What else is belief but direction?

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?

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

The world will not fail if Pakistan fails, but the world will be healthier if Pakistan is healthy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

[O]ver sufficiently long a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.

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.

They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.

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

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

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

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

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

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

Like Pakistan, America is, after all, a former English colony ...

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

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.

We are all migrants through time.

Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.

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.

(A revolver is) just a tool, really, like stapler. A stapler that punch through a person. Pin them. Drive blunt metal through flesh and bone.

Status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

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

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.

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

No believer is a bad believer.

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.

To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.

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

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.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

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

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

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

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

Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honor the goodness of the men who raised them,

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

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

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

Pride tells me to give it back, but common sense tells pride to shut up, have a joint and relax. I shrug and put the note into my wallet.

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

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

Novel writing is solitary work.

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

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

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

He was a man who discovered love through his penis.

Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.

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

Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.

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

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

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

Information is key at these things: no one wants to be caught holding social stock that's about to crash.

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.

The privileged liberal position: There should be equal rights for all; I should not have to share my riches with the poor.

Maximum return was the maxim to which we returned.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

The end of the world can be cozy at times.

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

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

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

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

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

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.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

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

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

In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was.

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.

Children are excellent judges of character, you know

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

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.

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

the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things,

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

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

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

He whispers a benediction and breathes it into the air, spreading his hope for you with a contraction of the lungs.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

PARENTS FIRST MET they were

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

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

The alliance between the US and Pakistan is thus predominantly between the US and the Pakistani military.

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?'