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" 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. "

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" 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 hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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

Writing

Become

" 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. "

" Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly. "

" 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. "

" Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet, and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die. "

" I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words. "

" 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. "

" I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language. "

" When the forces are aligning against hybridity, it harms everyone, as we are all migrants. Growing up in Pakistan, I know just how oppressive that kind of puritanical mindset can be. "

" When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response. "

" I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together. "

" 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. "

" I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past. "

" I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode. "

Mohsin Hamid

Without

Happy

" 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

" We are each of us composed of atoms, but equally, we are composed by time. "

Mohsin Hamid

Each

Composed

" Basically, asking me what kind of music I like is like asking what kind of food I like: 'Anything that tastes good,' is the answer. I'm the kind of guy who spends three times as much on his speakers as he does on his television. "

Mohsin Hamid

Good

Three

" Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state. "

Mohsin Hamid

Shadow

Lived

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active. "

" Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven't pushed yourself hard enough. "

" I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity. "