We recognise that, with time, every human being will cease being, will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
My grandparents used to pray five times a day, but they were quiet about their own thing. Completely liberal day by day; my grandmother was a social worker and my grandfather was an engineer, but they never talked about religion. My entire life I couldn’t remember one conversation I had with them about religion. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that… the reader is left with an echo of: ‘How much of this was from me?’ Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
Like many kids, I used to pretend all sorts of things. I would climb into a tree and imagine that I was on an island, that the grass below we was an ocean, that the leaves were the fins of sharks. Perhaps unlike many people, I never really stopped. I still have a childlike predisposition to fantasise and share my fantasies. Mohsin Hamid Read Quote
