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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

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Someone
Manhattan
Like
Queens
Lower
India
Exist
Lives
Away
Doesn
Lahore

More quotes by 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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You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from? I shook my head. It comes from feeling out of place, he said. Believe me. I know.
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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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 am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
Mohsin Hamid
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When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
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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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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All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.
Mohsin Hamid
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I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?
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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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
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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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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I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political I think they move together.
Mohsin Hamid
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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
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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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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If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.
Mohsin Hamid
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Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
Mohsin Hamid