347 Quotes by Mohsin Hamid

Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

Mumtaz has six moles. Two are black: behind her ear and on her hip, in the trough of the wave that crests at her pelvis. Three are the color of rust: knuckle, corner of jaw, behind knee. And one is red, fiery, at the base of her spine, where a tail might grow. I touch them and know them because I watch her like a man in a field stares up at the stars, and I love her constellation because it contains her story and our story, and I wonder which mole is the beginning and which is the end.

Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops — like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

У жорстокі часи завжди є хтось перший – наш знайомий або близька людина, кого ці часи в якийсь момент стосуються, через кого те, що здавалося страшним сном, раптово стає дійсністю, і ця дійсність спустошує.

Та загалом повідомляти в новинах не було чого: лише щоденна праця й життя незліченної кількості людей, і старіння, і любов, і розлучення, як і всюди, а тому зовсім не варте жодних заголовків, і воно не привертало нічиєї уваги, крім тих, кого це стосувалося безпосередньо.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

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.