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If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Look
Looks
Prisons
Trying
Prison
Like
Begin
Protect
Nation
Nations
States

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

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We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring.
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Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
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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.
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And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
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America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
Mohsin Hamid
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If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.
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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Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
Mohsin Hamid
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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
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When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.
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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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 take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
Mohsin Hamid
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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
Mohsin Hamid
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When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
Mohsin Hamid
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I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.
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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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 fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.
Mohsin Hamid
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When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
Mohsin Hamid