Quote

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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Needs
Write
Fill
Voids
Writing
Happens
Starts
Plugged
Something
Find
Figure
Freeing
Really
Wells
Figures
Digging
Make
Book
Happen
Void
Time
Well
Books
Maintain
Like
Nothing
Moving
Moves
Need
Difficult
Mostly

More quotes by 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
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I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
Mohsin Hamid
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I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.
Mohsin Hamid
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Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
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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I think fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.
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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Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment.
Mohsin Hamid
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We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.
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 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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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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I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.
Mohsin Hamid
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What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older.
Mohsin Hamid
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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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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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I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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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
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I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political I think they move together.
Mohsin Hamid