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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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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
World
Looks
Migration
Right
Partly
Important
Artists
Trying
Writers
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Imagine
Think
Future
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Paralysis

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I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political I think they move together.
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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
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I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'
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I'm not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it's in my comfort zone.
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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.
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How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?
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When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
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Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.
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I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
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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.
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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.
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Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.
Mohsin Hamid
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In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, the romance. The English is novel - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.
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?
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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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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.
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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.
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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.'
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It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back.
Mohsin Hamid