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A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Encounter
Encounters
Reader
Novel
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

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When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.
Mohsin Hamid
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How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?
Mohsin Hamid
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If my daughter wanted to wear a headscarf and dress in a religiously conservative way, I would be heartbroken. But if she were to decide to do that and she were to live in a place where people said she couldn't do that, I would be entirely committed to her right to do so.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
Mohsin Hamid
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When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
Mohsin Hamid
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I think fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.
Mohsin Hamid
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When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.
Mohsin Hamid
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If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.
Mohsin Hamid
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There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That's not going to go away. But that said, I think I'm cautiously optimistic that we're looking at a better future.
Mohsin Hamid
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In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, the romance. The English is novel - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
Mohsin Hamid
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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
Mohsin Hamid
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The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.
Mohsin Hamid
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I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?
Mohsin Hamid