Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamidis a British Pakistani novelist and writer. His novels are Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia...
NationalityPakistani
ProfessionWriter
CountryPakistan
breakup regret love-you
If you have ever, sir, been through a breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh as if seen for the first time then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.
echoes empathy persons
Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.
exactly happened life
I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.
aggression imagine narrative political towards
It's very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there's a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political view.
four home life places tie york
The four places I've called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.
thinking people common
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.
thinking networking dollars
Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.
self humanity brain
We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
art writing self
If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.
self helping sufi
Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.
love politics sides
'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.
book character dark
But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.
thinking cities looks
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 and ingenious stone-masonry to look older...
art writing world
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.