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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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Thousand
Barbarians
Cities
Illiterate
Indus
Four
Underground
Colonize
America
Ancestors
Boasted
Years
Ancestor
Basin
Would
Laid
Sewers
People
River
Grids
Rivers
Invade

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If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.
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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.
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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 US as a geopolitical player.
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Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.
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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.
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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.
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The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.
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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
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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.
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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.
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I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.
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Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn't another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.
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.
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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.
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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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We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.
Mohsin Hamid
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The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
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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.
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Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.
Mohsin Hamid