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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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Together
Nation
Pakistan
Ideas
Leader
Discovering
Firsts
Television
Leaders
First
Millions
Thinks
Assessed
Time
Open
Finally
Criticised
Thinking
Nations
Million
Debated
People
History
National
Forum
Given
Truly
Forums

More quotes by 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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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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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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All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.
Mohsin Hamid
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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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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
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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
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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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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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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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.
Mohsin Hamid
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I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
Mohsin Hamid
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I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
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