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" 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
Impossible
People
Step
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" I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television. "
Mohsin Hamid
City
Work
Television
" Literature helps us transcend ourselves. "
Mohsin Hamid
Transcend
Us
Literature
" 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
School
Done
American
" Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you're in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you're in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in... you're exposed to people with more. "
Mohsin Hamid
People
Car
City
" 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
Faith
Religion
Live
" 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
I Am
My Life
Hands
" Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them. "
Mohsin Hamid
Flying
First
Us
" Those of us who thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a pioneer of science fiction. "
Mohsin Hamid
Science
Pioneer
Us
" 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
Story
Fact
Natural
" Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years. "
Mohsin Hamid
Process
Years
Been
" 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
Now
Know
Horror
" How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means? "
Mohsin Hamid
Means
Big
How
" I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book. "
Mohsin Hamid
Book
Creativity
Think
" When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response. "
Mohsin Hamid
Anger
Natural
Terrorism
" 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
People
Time
Together
" The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable. "
Mohsin Hamid
Simple
City
Live
" I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker. "
Mohsin Hamid
Lived
Life
New
" I think we need to radically reimagine the future - citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone. "
Mohsin Hamid
Need
Artist
Think
" 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
Great
World
Two
" 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
Law
Rules
Society
" When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode. "
Mohsin Hamid
Without
Go
Happy
" 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
Religion
Art
Writing
" 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
Comfort
Feel
Comfort Zone
" Being a writer is not the point. Writing is. "
Mohsin Hamid
Point
Writer
Writing
" I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are. "
Mohsin Hamid
Courage
Think
Place
" 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
My Life
Home
Strong
" It's not that, living in Pakistan, I feel an enormous constraint on how I can write and what I can say; rather, I recognize that one has to navigate these things... Am I aware of things that one could say that would be risky or that could be dangerous? Certainly I'm aware of those things. "
Mohsin Hamid
Living
Say
Dangerous
" 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
Ambiguity
Much
Me
" I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience. "
Mohsin Hamid
Am
Experience
I Am
" 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
People
Never
Ocean