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Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Novels
Function
Novel
Stories
Power

More quotes by 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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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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Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.
Mohsin Hamid
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If my daughter wanted to wear a headscarf and dress in a religiously conservative way, I would be heartbroken. But if she were to decide to do that and she were to live in a place where people said she couldn't do that, I would be entirely committed to her right to do so.
Mohsin Hamid
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Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
Mohsin Hamid
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I don't want to be a Michael Moore-style artist, which is not to disparage Michael Moore. But he seems rather unsuccessful at winning people over who don't already agree with him.
Mohsin Hamid
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We keep the negative stuff because it's the negative stuff that's going to, you know, potentially kill us. That fin in the water - maybe it is a shark. That yellow thing behind the tree - maybe it is a lion. You need to be scared.
Mohsin Hamid
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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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For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.
Mohsin Hamid
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How many big businesses don't resort to underhand means?
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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For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
Mohsin Hamid
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Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
Mohsin Hamid
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I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
Mohsin Hamid
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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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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
Mohsin Hamid
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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.
Mohsin Hamid
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I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.
Mohsin Hamid
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I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge.
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