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What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker.

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Used
Religious
Weaker
Would
Getting
Tribe
Like
Help
Cope
Living
Extended
Strong
Tribes
Stuff
Beliefs
Helping
Families
Transience
Place
Belief
Outlive

More quotes by Mohsin Hamid

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The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.
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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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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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All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.
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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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Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.
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So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically.
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There's a reason prophets perform miracles language lacks the power to describe faith.
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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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When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
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The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.
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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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If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons.
Mohsin Hamid
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I am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
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.
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All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.
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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.
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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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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.
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Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.
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