Top 160 Mohsin Hamid Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “While they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.”

— Mohsin Hamid

53. “People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.”

— Mohsin Hamid

54. “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

55. “I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.” “Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When there were wars nearby.” “That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.”

— Mohsin Hamid

56. “Maximum return was the maxim to which we returned.”

— Mohsin Hamid

57. “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

58. “I’m best in small doses, believe me.”

— Mohsin Hamid

59. “Many parents were strict, and sometimes weeks would pass without us being able to meet those we thought of as our girlfriends. So we learned to savor the denial of gratification – that most un-American of pleasures! – and I for one could subsist quite happily on a diet of emails such as that which I have just described.”

— Mohsin Hamid

60. “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.”

— Mohsin Hamid

61. “But mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere, and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest to anyone but those directly involved.”

— Mohsin Hamid

62. “The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.”

— Mohsin Hamid

63. “You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.”

— Mohsin Hamid

64. “She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.”

— Mohsin Hamid

65. “He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone.”

— Mohsin Hamid

66. “There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That’s not going to go away. But that said, I think I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re looking at a better future.”

— Mohsin Hamid

67. “What else is belief but direction?”

— Mohsin Hamid

68. “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

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

— Mohsin Hamid

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

— Mohsin Hamid

71. “Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.”

— Mohsin Hamid

72. “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

73. “And also I think the rise of other, you could say, destinations for international jihadis mean that Pakistan isn’t necessarily the place where people from all over the world who want to engage in these activities gravitate to. They’re going now to places like Syria or Yemen Libya, elsewhere.”

— Mohsin Hamid

74. “Some men drink the blood of other men, all I drink is wine.”

— Mohsin Hamid

75. “They finished their coffees. Nadia asked if Saeed had been to the deserts of Chile an seen the stars an was it all he had imagined it would be. He nodded and said if she had an evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing in this lie, and she shut her eyes and said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did not know, then, if that evening would ever come.”

— Mohsin Hamid

76. “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

77. “There is something magical about London. It can coax a water lily to tie its roots to land.”

— Mohsin Hamid

78. “What happens is my mind starts to go in circles, thinking and thinking, and then I can’t sleep. And once a couple of days go by, if you haven’t slept, you start to get sick. You can’t eat. You start to cry. It just feeds on itself.”

— Mohsin Hamid

79. “And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she’s there, chemical wonder in her eyes.”

— Mohsin Hamid

80. “The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.”

— Mohsin Hamid

81. “Why the brevity? Because I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through.”

— Mohsin Hamid

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

— Mohsin Hamid

83. “One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.”

— Mohsin Hamid

84. “Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honour the goodness of the men who raised them, and Saeed was very much a young man of this mould.”

— Mohsin Hamid

85. “Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”

— Mohsin Hamid

86. “If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren’t differences at all.”

— Mohsin Hamid

87. “It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.”

— Mohsin Hamid

88. “The biggest lesson is you get the country you work for. 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

89. “How many big businesses don’t resort to underhand means?”

— Mohsin Hamid

90. “So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically.”

— Mohsin Hamid

91. “There’s a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.”

— Mohsin Hamid

92. “When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.”

— Mohsin Hamid

93. “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

94. “She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up.”

— Mohsin Hamid

95. “Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother’s corpse and screamed, and Saeed’s father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.”

— Mohsin Hamid

96. “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

97. “Soon a rhythm was established, and it was thereafter rare that more than a few waking hours would pass without contact between them, and they found themselves in those early days of their romance growing hungry, touching each other, but without bodily adjacency, without release. They had begun, each of them, to be penetrated, but they had not yet kissed.”

— Mohsin Hamid

98. “A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage.”

— Mohsin Hamid

99. “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

100. “For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”

— Mohsin Hamid