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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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
York
Invaders
People
Largest
City
Pakistan
Second
Plain
Aryans
Cities
Capital
Punjab
History
Nearly
Lahore
Home
British
Mongols
Many
Ancient
Layered
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My earliest memories are of watching Star Trek and MASH while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
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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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Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
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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.
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I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.
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We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
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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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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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I am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
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The ban on the burkini, which is basically a wetsuit, seems particularly ridiculous.
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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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Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.
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There's a reason prophets perform miracles language lacks the power to describe faith.
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A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
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We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.
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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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The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture.
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