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 Read Quote
The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way – as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago – they find a way to just carry on. But you’re stressed out. You’re worried, you know. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
There are many cultural scenes in Lahore, just as there are in London. And there is a celebrity culture here, just as there is in London. But in Lahore, the celebrity scene doesn’t drown out the rest quite so much. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite’s sense of realpolitik but also with the American public’s own sense of American values. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
The four places I’ve called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
I’m pro-human. And I think recognizing the human nature of migration is very important. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn’t mix, don’t mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don’t talk about that, that itself is a political thing. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
