For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain – some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I like the idea of an open, international London that thrives on attracting hard-working, talented people but has the confidence to tell them they must play by the same rules as everyone else. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Most Muslims do not ‘choose’ Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I think that when we take the long view, the notion that some people are deemed less worthy of being able to move – to not have the right to cross borders – over time, that’s going to seem as outmoded and as unfair, really, as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that in some senses could be thought of as traditionally American: The idea that everybody is equal; the idea that the rights of women and men should be the same. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
I am a fairly mongrelized person – you know I’ve been a migrant my whole life, and it’s hard to think of myself as any pure one thing. And so I take it, I guess, very personally – this notion that migrants are bad and that mixing is bad and that people from other places are bad. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
