“Like many kids, I used to pretend all sorts of things. I would climb into a tree and imagine that I was on an island, that the grass below we was an ocean, that the leaves were the fins of sharks. Perhaps unlike many people, I never really stopped. I still have a childlike predisposition to fantasise and share my fantasies.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Migration isn’t a one-directional process; it’s a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there.”
― 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
“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 try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers’ creativity and interaction with the book.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.”
― 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
“We are each of us composed of atoms, but equally, we are composed by time.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“There are many cultural scenes in Lahore, just as there are in London. And there is a celebrity culture here, just as there is in London. But in Lahore, the celebrity scene doesn’t drown out the rest quite so much.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“It’s very contrary to the notion of what America is to imagine that we can stop migration.”
― 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
“We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I’m pro-human. And I think recognizing the human nature of migration is very important.”
― 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 take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I personally tend to believe that there is a right to migration, the same way there’s a right to love whom you like and to believe what you believe and to say what you want to say.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“It’s not that, living in Pakistan, I feel an enormous constraint on how I can write and what I can say; rather, I recognize that one has to navigate these things… Am I aware of things that one could say that would be risky or that could be dangerous? Certainly I’m aware of those things.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“We recognise that, with time, every human being will cease being, will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“The four places I’ve called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.”
― 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 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’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
“I think there’s a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.”
― 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
“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
“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
“Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you’re in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you’re in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in… you’re exposed to people with more.”
― 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
“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
“Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way – as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago – they find a way to just carry on. But you’re stressed out. You’re worried, you know.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Literature helps us transcend ourselves.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers coming from India and the Indian diaspora.”
― 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 took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.”
― 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
“Basically, asking me what kind of music I like is like asking what kind of food I like: ‘Anything that tastes good,’ is the answer. I’m the kind of guy who spends three times as much on his speakers as he does on his television.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven’t pushed yourself hard enough.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“When I’m writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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 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
“Like many of my friends in the Pakistani diaspora – and many of my friends in Pakistan itself, for that matter – I have sometimes looked at the country of my birth and wondered whether its future will be one of steady and sad decline.”
― 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 terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America’s bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Most Muslims do not ‘choose’ Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.”
― 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
“I think I’ve always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was ‘your’ boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get ‘you.’”
― 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
“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
“I think that when we take the long view, the notion that some people are deemed less worthy of being able to move – to not have the right to cross borders – over time, that’s going to seem as outmoded and as unfair, really, as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that in some senses could be thought of as traditionally American: The idea that everybody is equal; the idea that the rights of women and men should be the same.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they’ll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I am a fairly mongrelized person – you know I’ve been a migrant my whole life, and it’s hard to think of myself as any pure one thing. And so I take it, I guess, very personally – this notion that migrants are bad and that mixing is bad and that people from other places are bad.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“There’s a real, brutal nature to the capitalism practiced by the main character in ‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.’ And I think playing dirty is certainly part of that.”
― 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
“The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don’t move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you’re born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you’ve lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“When the forces are aligning against hybridity, it harms everyone, as we are all migrants. Growing up in Pakistan, I know just how oppressive that kind of puritanical mindset can be.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Those of us who thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a pioneer of science fiction.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet, and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I studied about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and about how the Constitution was written by men, many of whom were slave owners. So I suppose the travel ban strikes me as coming from an era I thought we’d left behind, but I guess we haven’t entirely left it behind.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“I think we need to radically reimagine the future – citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone.”
― Mohsin Hamid
“Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before: to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics, too.”
― Mohsin Hamid
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