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
asking food good guy music speakers spends tastes three
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.
vanity guy comfort
I'm not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it's in my comfort zone.
believe guy feelings
You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from?" I shook my head. "It comes from feeling out of place," he said. "Believe me. I know.
people violent yorkers
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.
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.
complex given great
I don't want to be a propagandist or say that Pakistan is just great. There are problems, but it is a much more complex place than we are given to believe.
asked depending favourite fitzgerald list mention might name novels played tolkien tricks
I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.
earliest watching
My earliest memories are of watching 'Star Trek' and 'MASH' while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
cultural drown quite rest scenes
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.
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.
almost along broken gets good hard pushed unless writer written
Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven't pushed yourself hard enough.
art caribbean itself money novel plantation political politics religion talk
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.
aspect cling describe people realized trying
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.
comprehend gaze notions recognise reflects
In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there.