Mohsin Hamid Quotes

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Mohsin Hamid

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 23, 1971

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.

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

I don't want to be a propagandist or say that Pakistan is just great. There are problems, but it is a much more complex place than we are given to believe.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Mohsin Hamid

My grandparents used to pray five times a day, but they were quiet about their own thing. Completely liberal day by day; my grandmother was a social worker and my grandfather was an engineer, but they never talked about religion. My entire life I couldn't remember one conversation I had with them about religion.

Mohsin Hamid

I'm not a representative of Pakistan; I'm just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally.

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

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

Mohsin Hamid

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

Mohsin Hamid

For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.

Mohsin Hamid

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.

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

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