Mohsin Hamid Quotes

We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

I think the idea of migration through time is very important because every human being does that and it unites us with people who migrate through geography.

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

Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.

There's a reason prophets perform miracles: language lacks the power to describe faith. And you have to land on faith before you can even begin to hike around to its flip side, betrayal.

We are all migrants through time.

I have this thing about friends and secrets. Sometimes when I meet a person I like, I tell them a secret they don't know me well enough to be told. It lets me judge their potential as a friend.

She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.

Language lacks the power to describe Faith.

Children are excellent judges of character, you know

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

The end of the world can be cozy at times.

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.

And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent—admittedly in my own best interest—on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.

...status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

Some men drink the blood of other men, all I drink is wine.

Pride tells me to give it back, but common sense tells pride to shut up, have a joint and relax. I shrug and put the note into my wallet.

In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.

It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

If differences can be hidden, perhaps there aren't differences at all

Didn't you tell me smoking ruined your stamina as a boxer? ...Ruined is a strong word, I'd say....It helps fight boredom. It gives you more to do and less time to do it in.

Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.