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All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Humans
Migration
Refugee
Childhood
Everyone
Stories
Human

More quotes by 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
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What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
Mohsin Hamid
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When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That's not going to go away. But that said, I think I'm cautiously optimistic that we're looking at a better future.
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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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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Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.
Mohsin Hamid
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I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
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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I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
Mohsin Hamid
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I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.
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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I would have bet money that Britain would not vote to leave the EU, and I would have been wrong. I would have bet money that Trump would not have been the Republican nominee, and I would have been wrong and I certainly would have bet money that he wouldn't win the election.
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
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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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When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid