Quote

We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.

Mohsin Hamid

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Express
Limits
Place
People
Skeptical

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

Image
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
Image
All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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
Image
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.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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
Image
I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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
Image
When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
Mohsin Hamid
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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