Mohsin Hamid Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'. 'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'. 'But it's a very good one. You can almost see colours.

Mohsin Hamid
I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

Mohsin Hamid
When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

Mohsin Hamid
There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.

Mohsin Hamid
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
I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.

Mohsin Hamid
Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops - like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

Mohsin Hamid
Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

Mohsin Hamid
What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings — younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older...

Mohsin Hamid
Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.

Mohsin Hamid
And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

Mohsin Hamid
Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

Mohsin Hamid
One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.

Mohsin Hamid
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.

Mohsin Hamid
If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all.

Mohsin Hamid
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
Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that.

Mohsin Hamid
You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from?" I shook my head. "It comes from feeling out of place," he said. "Believe me. I know.

Mohsin Hamid
It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.

Mohsin Hamid
We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

Mohsin Hamid
Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.

Mohsin Hamid
In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.

Mohsin Hamid
I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.

Mohsin Hamid
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
It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.

Mohsin Hamid
I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.

Mohsin Hamid
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Mohsin Hamid
As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.

Mohsin Hamid
But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

Mohsin Hamid
You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.

Mohsin Hamid