Mohsin Hamid Quotes

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

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

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.

I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense.

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

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

I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.

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

It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back.

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

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

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.

What else is belief but direction?

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist.

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.

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

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.

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

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

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.

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.

We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.

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.

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.

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

I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?

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

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.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

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.

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

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

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

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

Walking is a meditative act. It's so rare that we allow ourselves just to be.

I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.

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.

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.

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.