Mohsin Hamid Quotes

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Mohsin Hamid

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 23, 1971

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

Mohsin Hamid

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

Mohsin Hamid

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

I've realized that it's important to stop trying to think I'm any one thing. People are confused as to their identity and try to cling to one aspect of that identity to describe what they are: American, Republican, Muslim. These are really incomplete.

Mohsin Hamid

There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

Mohsin Hamid

I think that there is a degree of petulance around President Trump and also a degree of sort of blundering incompetence, which is unlike most businesspeople.

Mohsin Hamid

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

It's very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there's a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.

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 U.S. as a geopolitical player.

Mohsin Hamid