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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

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Guy
Comes
Feelings
Place
Believe
Watchful
Shook
Head
Feeling

More quotes by 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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I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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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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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 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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For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.
Mohsin Hamid
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I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
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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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
Mohsin Hamid
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There's a reason prophets perform miracles language lacks the power to describe faith.
Mohsin Hamid
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Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment.
Mohsin Hamid
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When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
Mohsin Hamid
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Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.
Mohsin Hamid
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It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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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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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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Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
Mohsin Hamid
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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
Mohsin Hamid