347 Quotes by Mohsin Hamid

Not – please understand me – that I was convinced that I had made a mistake; no, I was merely unconvinced that I had not made a mistake. I was, in other words, confused.

I think I’ve always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was ‘your’ boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get ‘you.’

America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she’s there, chemical wonder in her eyes.

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.

A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage.

But mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere, and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest to anyone but those directly involved.

Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels – with fewer pages of plot to them – are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs are still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.

There’s a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.