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
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
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. – Mohsin Hamid
In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there. – Mohsin Hamid
I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto. – 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
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
I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it. – Mohsin Hamid
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 think the most effective forms of critique are ones that establish a common ground for people to occupy, and then appeal to the best nature of people on that common ground. – Mohsin Hamid
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. – Mohsin Hamid
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
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity. – Mohsin Hamid
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
When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different. – Mohsin Hamid
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
When I’m writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode. – Mohsin Hamid
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
I don’t want to be a Michael Moore-style artist, which is not to disparage Michael Moore. But he seems rather unsuccessful at winning people over who don’t already agree with him. – Mohsin Hamid
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
There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It’s hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started. – Mohsin Hamid
Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly. – Mohsin Hamid
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
I don’t want to be a propagandist or say that Pakistan is just great. There are problems, but it is a much more complex place than we are given to believe. – 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
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