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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.

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Place
Museums
Certain
Parks
Writing
Hopefully
Like
Experiences
Impact
City
Museum
Novel
Amusement
Cities
Park

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

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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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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
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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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Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.
Mohsin Hamid
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I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.
Mohsin Hamid
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The ban on the burkini, which is basically a wetsuit, seems particularly ridiculous.
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 was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
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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Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.
Mohsin Hamid
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When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.
Mohsin Hamid
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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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And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
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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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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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.
Mohsin Hamid
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My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.'
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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What else is belief but direction?
Mohsin Hamid