Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly. Mohsin Hamid More Quotes by Mohsin Hamid More Quotes From Mohsin Hamid The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want. Mohsin Hamid strongwantbeach I think wars, climate change, all that stuff is going to move people. And so I wanted to say, "What if the migration apocalypse occurs and it isn't an apocalypse at all?" Maybe we will still find ways to be happy and for our children and grandchildren to thrive and the world to move on. Mohsin Hamid warchildrenmoving The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it's important for writers and artists to try to imagine that. Mohsin Hamid artisttryingthinking My aunt used to say, "It's between me and my god; it's got nothing to do with you." It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it's a good way of putting it. Mohsin Hamid auntreligiouskids Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal. Mohsin Hamid spiritualityreasonthinking If the dominant political expression that we're seeing right now is of nostalgia and we know that nostalgia won't really work out, what happens is, we become depressed as individuals and societies - when we're depressed, we're much more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by demagogues and xenophobes. Mohsin Hamid work-outtakenexpression Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists. Mohsin Hamid artistpeoplethinking The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet. Mohsin Hamid internetsurfingphones If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay. Mohsin Hamid okayifswant I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it? Mohsin Hamid peoplemovingthinking 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. Mohsin Hamid upsetfeelingsbook We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive. Mohsin Hamid imagining-the-futurewayneeds I would have bet money that Britain would not vote to leave the EU, and I would have been wrong. I would have bet money that Trump would not have been the Republican nominee, and I would have been wrong and I certainly would have bet money that he wouldn't win the election. Mohsin Hamid electionvotewinning A beard is something that is almost like a mirror to the viewer. When someone sees you wearing a beard, they're seeing something in their own imagination because it's still me whether I'm bearded or not. Mohsin Hamid beardmirrorsimagination When people, particularly young people and especially young men, can't imagine themselves as heroes in narratives that they construct for themselves, they look to be heroes in some other way. So young men in America of, let's say, Muslim background, only a tiny, tiny minority - so small as to be almost zero - are likely to ever commit terrorist acts. Mohsin Hamid zeroheromen In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s. Mohsin Hamid americaideasthinking I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak. Mohsin Hamid often-iscitiespeople Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that, in some senses, could be thought of as traditionally American - the idea that everybody's equal, that the rights of women and men should be the same, that there should be no discrimination on religious or sexual orientation, that democracy and rule of law and due process are the ways in which society should govern themselves and minorities should be cared for. Mohsin Hamid religiousrightsmen I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned. Mohsin Hamid funny-relationshipcaliforniathree My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do. Mohsin Hamid dadreadingbook
