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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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Sort
Wiggling
Break
Gulliver
Often
Inadvertently
America
Toes
Made
Affairs
World
Affair
Arms
Strength

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

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The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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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
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The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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I think wars, climate change, all that stuff is going to move people. And so I wanted to say, What if the migration apocalypse occurs and it isn't an apocalypse at all? Maybe we will still find ways to be happy and for our children and grandchildren to thrive and the world to move on.
Mohsin Hamid
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A beard is something that is almost like a mirror to the viewer. When someone sees you wearing a beard, they're seeing something in their own imagination because it's still me whether I'm bearded or not.
Mohsin Hamid
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think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.
Mohsin Hamid
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I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political I think they move together.
Mohsin Hamid
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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
Mohsin Hamid
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How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?
Mohsin Hamid
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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
Mohsin Hamid
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My mother has been to Mecca to perform her hajj my dad hasn't. I come from a very liberal family, so even the people who are outwardly religious tend to subscribe to gender equality, the importance of open-mindedness, all that stuff. My family is generally nonprescriptive.
Mohsin Hamid
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Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal.
Mohsin Hamid
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When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
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 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
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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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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