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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
Away
Doesn
Lahore
Someone
Manhattan
Like
Queens
Lower
India
Exist
Lives

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

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The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it's important for writers and artists to try to imagine that.
Mohsin Hamid
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Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
Mohsin Hamid
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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
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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I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
Mohsin Hamid
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My mother has been to Mecca to perform her hajj my dad hasn't. I come from a very liberal family, so even the people who are outwardly religious tend to subscribe to gender equality, the importance of open-mindedness, all that stuff. My family is generally nonprescriptive.
Mohsin Hamid
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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
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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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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If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.
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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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
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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When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.
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 am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
Mohsin Hamid
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Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn't another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.
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 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