347 Quotes by Mohsin Hamid

Many parents were strict, and sometimes weeks would pass without us being able to meet those we thought of as our girlfriends. So we learned to savor the denial of gratification – that most un-American of pleasures! – and I for one could subsist quite happily on a diet of emails such as that which I have just described.

In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was.

Power comes from becoming change.

I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond – only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.

For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

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.

Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.

We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy’s sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.