Mohsin Hamid Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Love, Book, Reading

  Mohsin Hamid (2014). “Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York and London”, p.81, Penguin UK

• 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 . . .

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Reading, Different

• But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Character, Dark

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

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Taj Mahal, Painting

• The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Force, Notion

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Book, Echoes, Ambiguity

• When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Moving, Book, Writing

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Children, Book, Wind

• 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.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Writing, Two

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Feelings, Upset

  Source: www.npr.org

• I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Writing, Trying

  Source: www.npr.org

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

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, People, Half

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

  Mohsin Hamid

  Believe, Book, Years

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

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Writing, Years

• My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Dad, Reading, Book

  "Love in the Time of Mass Migration". Interview With Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. March 4, 2017.

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