Top 160 Mohsin Hamid Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Information is key at these things: no one wants to be caught holding social stock that’s about to crash.”

— Mohsin Hamid

102. “The blast wave that passed through my sister’s office doubtless passed through devout Muslims, atheist Muslims, gay Muslims, funny Muslims, and lovestruck Muslims – not to mention Pakistani Christians, Chinese engineers, American security contractors, and Indian Sikhs. What civilization, then, did the bomb target? And from what civilization did it originate?”

— Mohsin Hamid

103. “She listened to me speak with a series of smiles, as though she were sipping at my descriptions and finding them to her taste.”

— Mohsin Hamid

104. “Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.”

— Mohsin Hamid

105. “Novels are make-believe and play for adults.”

— Mohsin Hamid

106. “Lightning flickered above the city, a crescent moon sneered through a gap in the clouds. The boutique huddled against the storm, a tiny island of light on an unlit street.”

— Mohsin Hamid

107. “What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings – younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older...”

— Mohsin Hamid

108. “We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.”

— Mohsin Hamid

109. “It is odd, isn’t it? Whenever I read something interesting, I tear out a piece and keep it as a talisman until I find something new to replace it with. It’s a sort of superstition. I did it once and it helped me break out of writer’s block, so I’ve done it ever since. Librarians must hate me.”

— Mohsin Hamid

110. “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.”

— Mohsin Hamid

111. “Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.”

— Mohsin Hamid

112. “Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.”

— Mohsin Hamid

113. “I think there’s a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we’re drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.”

— Mohsin Hamid

114. “We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.”

— Mohsin Hamid

115. “Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.”

— Mohsin Hamid

116. “Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.”

— Mohsin Hamid

117. “The most important thing to keep in mind is not that we are all the same, but that we are all equally weird.”

— Mohsin Hamid

118. “As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.”

— Mohsin Hamid

119. “If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.”

— Mohsin Hamid

120. “Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization’s brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law.”

— Mohsin Hamid

121. “Lightning’s echo comes as thunder. And the city waits for thunder’s echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half.”

— Mohsin Hamid

122. “But even now the city’s freewheeling virtual world stood in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people, to those of young men, and especially of young women, and above all of children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.”

— Mohsin Hamid

123. “Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places.”

— Mohsin Hamid

124. “I think I’ve always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was ‘your’ boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get ‘you.’”

— Mohsin Hamid

125. “Pakistan now is like a horror film franchise. You know, it’s ‘Friday the 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist from Pakistan.’ And each time we hear of Pakistan it’s in that context.”

— Mohsin Hamid

126. “I know I’m standing still, but I feel like I’ve stumbled and I’m starting to fall.”

— Mohsin Hamid

127. “I just gritted my teeth, took out a needle, and worked him out of my heart like a splinter.”

— Mohsin Hamid

128. “It’s amazing what the gene pool will do to perpetuate itself.”

— Mohsin Hamid

129. “I don’t know if I’m truly at home in any language.”

— Mohsin Hamid

130. “It leaves space for your thoughts to echo.”

— Mohsin Hamid

131. “You learn a lot about your man when you become the mother of his child.”

— Mohsin Hamid

132. “When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.”

— Mohsin Hamid

133. “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.”

— Mohsin Hamid

134. “I feel the illusion I’ve twirled around me like a sari start to come undone and fall to my feet.”

— Mohsin Hamid

135. “There’s a reason prophets perform miracles: language lacks the power to describe faith. And you have to land on faith before you can even begin to hike around to its flip side, betrayal.”

— Mohsin Hamid

136. “You know you’re in trouble when you can’t meet a woman’s eye.”

— Mohsin Hamid

137. “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

138. “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

139. “Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers coming from India and the Indian diaspora.”

— Mohsin Hamid

140. “Not – please understand me – that I was convinced that I had made a mistake; no, I was merely unconvinced that I had not made a mistake. I was, in other words, confused.”

— Mohsin Hamid

141. “Novel writing is solitary work.”

— Mohsin Hamid

142. “Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.”

— Mohsin Hamid

143. “Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels – with fewer pages of plot to them – are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs are still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.”

— Mohsin Hamid

144. “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.”

— Mohsin Hamid

145. “It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America’s bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword.”

— Mohsin Hamid

146. “I believe one can gauge a book’s impact only after about 10 years.”

— Mohsin Hamid

147. “She’s finished her cigarette but hasn’t put it out properly, so it’s still smoking in the ashtray. I crush mine into it, grinding until both stop burning.”

— Mohsin Hamid

148. “I’m not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it’s in my comfort zone.”

— Mohsin Hamid

149. “But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.”

— Mohsin Hamid

150. “What distinguishes the “war on terror” is that it is a war against a concept, not a nation. And the enemy concept, it seems to me, is pluralism.”

— Mohsin Hamid