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
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.
thinking self links
I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.
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.
self imagine easy
If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.
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.
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.
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.
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.