Mohsin Hamid
I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.Collection: Courage
When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.Collection: Travel
Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.Collection: Jealousy
Capitalism is like the law of the jungle with a few rules. There isn't another system that works for our society but left unchecked, capitalism can have a dehumanising effect.Collection: Society
When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.Collection: Anger
Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet, and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die.Collection: Diet
Like many of my friends in the Pakistani diaspora - and many of my friends in Pakistan itself, for that matter - I have sometimes looked at the country of my birth and wondered whether its future will be one of steady and sad decline.Collection: Sad
Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.
Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.
Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.
Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
I think that there is a degree of petulance around President Trump and also a degree of sort of blundering incompetence, which is unlike most businesspeople.
I studied about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and about how the Constitution was written by men, many of whom were slave owners. So I suppose the travel ban strikes me as coming from an era I thought we'd left behind, but I guess we haven't entirely left it behind.
I'm pro-human. And I think recognizing the human nature of migration is very important.
Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
There are many cultural scenes in Lahore, just as there are in London. And there is a celebrity culture here, just as there is in London. But in Lahore, the celebrity scene doesn't drown out the rest quite so much.
Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.
Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
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.
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.
Pakistan now is like a horror film franchise. You know, it's 'Friday the 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist from Pakistan.' And each time we hear of Pakistan it's in that context.
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.
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.
I've realized that it's important to stop trying to think I'm any one thing. People are confused as to their identity and try to cling to one aspect of that identity to describe what they are: American, Republican, Muslim. These are really incomplete.
I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together.
'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.
I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.
Chance plays a powerful role in every life - our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all; a few drops here or there matter enormously - but consequences often become more serious as income levels go down.
I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.
Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.
The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
For a combination of reasons, and despite evident fondness for American products and individuals, my impression is that most Pakistanis have extremely negative views of the U.S. as a geopolitical player.
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.
Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you're in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you're in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in... you're exposed to people with more.
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?'
For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.
Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way - as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago - they find a way to just carry on. But you're stressed out. You're worried, you know.
Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.
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.
As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.
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.
Novel writing is solitary work.
I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.
Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers coming from India and the Indian diaspora.
There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.
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.
I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.
Basically, asking me what kind of music I like is like asking what kind of food I like: 'Anything that tastes good,' is the answer. I'm the kind of guy who spends three times as much on his speakers as he does on his television.