Top 160 Mohsin Hamid Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.”

— Mohsin Hamid

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

— Mohsin Hamid

3. “The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.”

— Mohsin Hamid

4. “When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.”

— Mohsin Hamid

5. “We are all migrants through time.”

— Mohsin Hamid

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

— Mohsin Hamid

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

— Mohsin Hamid

8. “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

9. “I don’t listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.”

— Mohsin Hamid

10. “I have this thing about friends and secrets. Sometimes when I meet a person I like, I tell them a secret they don’t know me well enough to be told. It lets me judge their potential as a friend.”

— Mohsin Hamid

11. “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

12. “I’d rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.”

— Mohsin Hamid

13. “It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.”

— Mohsin Hamid

14. “The end of the world can be cozy at times.”

— Mohsin Hamid

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

— Mohsin Hamid

16. “A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery.”

— Mohsin Hamid

17. “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

18. “People don’t believe in consequences anymore.”

— Mohsin Hamid

19. “I think there’s really strong social stratification in South Asia.”

— Mohsin Hamid

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20. “Literature helps us transcend ourselves.”

— Mohsin Hamid

21. “Power comes from becoming change.”

— Mohsin Hamid

22. “Secrets make life more interesting. You can be in a crowded room with someone and touch them without touching, just with a look, because they know a part of you no one else knows. And whenever you’re with them, the two of you are alone, because the you they see no one else can see.”

— Mohsin Hamid

23. “I felt suddenly very young – or perhaps I felt my age.”

— Mohsin Hamid

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

— Mohsin Hamid

25. “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

26. “To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.”

— Mohsin Hamid

27. “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

28. “Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.”

— Mohsin Hamid

29. “Children are excellent judges of character, you know.”

— Mohsin Hamid

30. “And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.”

— Mohsin Hamid

31. “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

32. “The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play.”

— Mohsin Hamid

33. “Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.”

— Mohsin Hamid

34. “What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.”

— Mohsin Hamid

35. “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.”

— Mohsin Hamid

36. “To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and awaits its fate, if only for a while.”

— Mohsin Hamid

37. “Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.”

— Mohsin Hamid

38. “I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond – only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.”

— Mohsin Hamid

39. “The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.”

— Mohsin Hamid

40. “Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing.”

— Mohsin Hamid

41. “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.”

— Mohsin Hamid

42. “I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.”

— Mohsin Hamid

43. “In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.”

— Mohsin Hamid

44. “In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was.”

— Mohsin Hamid

45. “In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.”

— Mohsin Hamid

46. “Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew’s commencement, and Saeed prayer for peace and Saeed’s father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pry for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.”

— Mohsin Hamid

47. “But surely it is the gist that matters; I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you – an American – will agree, it is the thrust of one’s narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one’s details.”

— Mohsin Hamid

48. “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

49. “In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be.”

— Mohsin Hamid

50. “It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class – in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding – but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”

— Mohsin Hamid