Quote

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Mohsin Hamid

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Create
Another
Human
Humans
Take
Jointly
Something
Novels
Novel
Head

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

Image
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
Image
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.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
I am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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
Image
I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
Chance plays a powerful role in every life - our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all a few drops here or there matter enormously - but consequences often become more serious as income levels go down.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
Mohsin Hamid