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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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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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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
Mohsin Hamid
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We keep the negative stuff because it's the negative stuff that's going to, you know, potentially kill us. That fin in the water - maybe it is a shark. That yellow thing behind the tree - maybe it is a lion. You need to be scared.
Mohsin Hamid
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There's a reason prophets perform miracles language lacks the power to describe faith.
Mohsin Hamid
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Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
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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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You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.
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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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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When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.
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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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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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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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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The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet.
Mohsin Hamid
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If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.
Mohsin Hamid
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If my daughter wanted to wear a headscarf and dress in a religiously conservative way, I would be heartbroken. But if she were to decide to do that and she were to live in a place where people said she couldn't do that, I would be entirely committed to her right to do so.
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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All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.
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