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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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Arrivals
Recent
Privileged
Perspective
World

More quotes by 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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Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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The ban on the burkini, which is basically a wetsuit, seems particularly ridiculous.
Mohsin Hamid
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I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
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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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
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Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
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 terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
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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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
Mohsin Hamid
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A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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I am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid