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" I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past. "
Mohsin Hamid
Feel
In The Past
Place
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" America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian. "
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Break
" If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy. "
Mohsin Hamid
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" Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable. "
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" I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity. "
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" There's a real, brutal nature to the capitalism practiced by the main character in 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.' And I think playing dirty is certainly part of that. "
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" Chance plays a powerful role in every life - our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all; a few drops here or there matter enormously - but consequences often become more serious as income levels go down. "
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Soup
" 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
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Natural
" 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
India
Attention
Media
" I'm not a representative of Pakistan; I'm just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally. "
Mohsin Hamid
Example
Different
Believe
" 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
" 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
Know
I Am
Life
" 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
" 'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing. "
Mohsin Hamid
Two
Stronger
Love
" Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality. "
Mohsin Hamid
Live
Deal
Life
" 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
Life
Religion
Day
" For a combination of reasons, and despite evident fondness for American products and individuals, my impression is that most Pakistanis have extremely negative views of the U.S. as a geopolitical player. "
Mohsin Hamid
Impression
Negative
Products
" I've realized that it's important to stop trying to think I'm any one thing. People are confused as to their identity and try to cling to one aspect of that identity to describe what they are: American, Republican, Muslim. These are really incomplete. "
Mohsin Hamid
Think
Stop
People
" I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language. "
Mohsin Hamid
Know
Truly
Language
" I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me. "
Mohsin Hamid
Family
City
Cousins
" In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before. "
Mohsin Hamid
Help
Writing
Experience
" My earliest memories are of watching 'Star Trek' and 'MASH' while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through. "
Mohsin Hamid
Memories
Parents
Chicken
" Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. "
Mohsin Hamid
Yourself
Empathy
Finding
" 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
Confidence
Play
People
" 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. "
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Me
Writing
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" 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
Over
Writing
Art
" 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
" Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians. "
Mohsin Hamid
Interesting
Great
Know
" Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics. "
Mohsin Hamid
Characteristics
Race
Islam
" 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
Rebel
Nostalgia
Past
" Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state. "
Mohsin Hamid
Up
Shadow
Lived