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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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Novel
Word
Experimentation
Form
Italian
Something
Fundamental
Love
Romance
Fundamentals
English
Elements

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
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I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
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We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.
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My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.
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What else is belief but direction?
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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
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The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
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When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
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Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.
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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.
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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.
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I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
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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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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.
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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
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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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A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
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When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
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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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As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'
Mohsin Hamid