Mohsin Hamid Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Our countries are weaker: they cannot protect us from imported goods, they can't protect us from climate change, they cannot protect us from epidemics. These things cross borders. But the kind of cooperation that would protect us from those things was completely lacking and because of this there's been a backlash. People feel vulnerable.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Country, Epidemics, People

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

  4 Copy quote

• We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Love Is, Thinking, Romance

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops - like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Dirty, Men, White

  Mohsin Hamid (2007). “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, p.64, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  10 Copy quote

• Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Stories, Function, Novel

  Source: www.npr.org

  4 Copy quote

• I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge.

  Mohsin Hamid

  New York, Moving, Thinking

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Law, Our Society, Capitalism

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Imagining The Future, Way, Needs

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Love Is, Two Sides, Stronger

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Machines, Television, Produce

  Mohsin Hamid (2015). “Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London”, p.62, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Thinking, Example, Networking

  4 Copy quote

• In some contexts in Pakistan maybe a beard is negative. It depends. And in some contexts in America maybe a beard is positive. I think there's certainly lots of hipster communities where having a beard makes me look a little bit less like a, you know, middle-aged fuddy-duddy. And there's some places in Pakistan where having a beard, you know, certain corporate contexts, certain social contexts, where it's not an advantage to have a beard.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Hipster, Thinking, America

  Source: www.npr.org

  4 Copy quote

• In a way, every parent is sort of dependent on the benevolence of the society around them to take care of their children.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Children, Parent, Care

  Source: www.npr.org

  4 Copy quote

• You know, you get a bad review as a writer, you remember it for 10 years. You get a hundred good reviews, you forget them all. You say hello to a hundred people in the city and it doesn't mean anything to you. One racist comment passes by, and it sticks with you a decade.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Mean, Years, Cities

  Source: www.npr.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Cities, Often Is, People

  Source: www.npr.org

  4 Copy quote

• Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

  Mohsin Hamid

  New York, Home, Cities

  Mohsin Hamid (2007). “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, p.7, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  16 Copy quote

• You know, very often, if you look at the kinds of communications that they're getting in an ISIS recruiting video, the videos that, you know, that one hears of as radicalizing them, these are like action movies. And so in the sense, it's that 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

  Communication, Hero, Men

  Source: www.npr.org

  7 Copy quote

• I think that we live in a world - and this is something which living in Pakistan, perhaps, has taught me - and, you know, we live in a world where there is a constant feed from social media, the news, etc., of things that can scare us. And we become so anxious because human beings are meant - are designed to be sensitized to dangerous stuff.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Thinking, Media, Scare

  Source: www.npr.org

  4 Copy quote

• I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Memories, Believe, Hypocrite

  Mohsin Hamid (2000). “Moth Smoke”, p.203, Penguin Books India

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• 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

  Country, Pakistan, Diaspora

  "The Pakistan election has given me hope that one day the country can once again become my home" by Mohsin Hamid, www.theguardian.com. February 21, 2008.

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Stars, Memories, Kids

  7 Copy quote

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

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Taj Mahal, Painting

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Winning, People

  7 Copy quote

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