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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
Looks
Prisons
Trying
Prison
Like
Begin
Protect
Nation
Nations
States
Look

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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.
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What else is belief but direction?
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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.
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think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.
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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.
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When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
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The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture.
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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.
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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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When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.
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We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.
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My earliest memories are of watching Star Trek and MASH while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.
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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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I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.
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I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
Mohsin Hamid