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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
Cities
Plain
Aryans
History
Capital
Punjab
Home
Nearly
Lahore
Many
British
Mongols
Like
Ancient
Layered
People
York
Invaders
City
Largest
Second
Pakistan

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I am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
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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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What else is belief but direction?
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I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
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So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically.
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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.
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For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
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Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
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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.
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I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
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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.
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I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
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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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Our countries are weaker: they cannot protect us from imported goods, they can't protect us from climate change, they cannot protect us from epidemics. These things cross borders. But the kind of cooperation that would protect us from those things was completely lacking and because of this there's been a backlash. People feel vulnerable.
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The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
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A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
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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.
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When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.
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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.
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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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