Quotes by Mohsin Hamid

About Mohsin Hamid:

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist and writer. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Mohsin Hamid

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way in...

Mohsin Hamid

The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'. 'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'. 'But it's a very good one. You can almost s...

Mohsin Hamid

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 even...

Mohsin Hamid

I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

Mohsin Hamid

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it care...

Mohsin Hamid

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vi...

Mohsin Hamid

But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn't feel any passion to write about the place. I didn't give a damn about local politics; I wasn't moved by the issues. I missed ho...

Mohsin Hamid

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

Mohsin Hamid

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

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, squabbl...

Mohsin Hamid

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings — younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment a...

Mohsin Hamid

I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.

Mohsin Hamid

[...] I stated to them among other things that no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.

Mohsin Hamid

It seemed to me then - and to be honest, sir, seems to me still - that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of yo...

Mohsin Hamid

They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.

Mohsin Hamid

What happens is my mind starts to go in circles, thinking and thinking, and then I can't sleep. And once a couple of days go by, if you haven't slept, you start to get sick. You can't eat. You start to cry. It just feeds on itself.

Mohsin Hamid

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.

Mohsin Hamid

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

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

Mohsin Hamid

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

Mohsin Hamid

Author Bio

  • NameMohsin Hamid
  • DescriptionPakistani novelist
  • Born1971
  • CountryPakistan
  • ProfessionWriter
  • AwardsBetty Trask Award