110+ Mohsin Hamid Quotes On Muhammad, Education And Religion

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist and writer. He is best known for his novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West. His work often focuses on the contemporary Muslim experience and has been translated into over 30 languages. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Mohsin Hamid on muhammad, education, religion.

Top 10 Mohsin Hamid Quotes

1. It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.
2. I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense.
3. I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.
4. Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.
5. There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.
6. All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.
7. When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
8. The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.
9. All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.
10. Which is stronger, politics or love? is like asking, Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling? They are two sides of the same thing.

Mohsin Hamid Short Quotes

• Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.
• If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.
• Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
• The ban on the burkini, which is basically a wetsuit, seems particularly ridiculous.
• Novel writing is solitary work.
• Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
• We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.
• When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.
• I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.
• For many people, there is an almost power to be found in prayer.

Mohsin Hamid Quotes About Religion

Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal. — Mohsin Hamid

Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture. — Mohsin Hamid

I actually feel that personal matters, like religion and spirituality, are things that I really discuss only with intimates. I think it's, in a way, like sexuality, something where it touches upon something very private. — Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid Quotes About Love

The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books. — Mohsin Hamid

For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying. — Mohsin Hamid

NYC doesn't have a big sign saying "You must love diversity and the rights of all people." And that's not what makes you love diversity in NYC or anywhere. What makes you love diversity is because you live in it and you experience it. — Mohsin Hamid

In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form. — Mohsin Hamid

We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don't think that's true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring. — Mohsin Hamid

Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die. — Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid Quotes About Fiction

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books. — Mohsin Hamid

I think fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong. — Mohsin Hamid

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed. — Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid Famous Quotes And Sayings

In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker. — Mohsin Hamid

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. — Mohsin Hamid

I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her. — Mohsin Hamid

I think the most effective forms of critique are ones that establish a common ground for people to occupy, and then appeal to the best nature of people on that common ground. — Mohsin Hamid

If an American teenager were to come to Lahore, they'd have wildly different experiences depending on whom they met. They could party and get drunk and smoke hashish with some, while others would say, "Let's get some religious instruction." — Mohsin Hamid

There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That's not going to go away. But that said, I think I'm cautiously optimistic that we're looking at a better future. — Mohsin Hamid

India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist. — Mohsin Hamid

Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities. — Mohsin Hamid

So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically. — Mohsin Hamid

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide. — Mohsin Hamid

Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that, in some senses, could be thought of as traditionally American - the idea that everybody's equal, that the rights of women and men should be the same, that there should be no discrimination on religious or sexual orientation, that democracy and rule of law and due process are the ways in which society should govern themselves and minorities should be cared for. — Mohsin Hamid

The animosity between India and Pakistan is deeply unfortunate and dangerous, and it's something I've long campaigned to reduce. But right now, when there's artillery being exchanged in Kashmir - which is not for from here, either - and there are 100-ish nuclear weapons on each side of the border, there's never really been a case like this where two nuclear armed countries are happily shelling each other. — Mohsin Hamid

My aunt used to say, "It's between me and my god; it's got nothing to do with you." It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it's a good way of putting it. — Mohsin Hamid

I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist. — Mohsin Hamid

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street. — Mohsin Hamid

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits. — Mohsin Hamid

Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. — Mohsin Hamid

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality. — Mohsin Hamid

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture. — Mohsin Hamid

I would have bet money that Britain would not vote to leave the EU, and I would have been wrong. I would have bet money that Trump would not have been the Republican nominee, and I would have been wrong and I certainly would have bet money that he wouldn't win the election. — Mohsin Hamid

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

I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge. — Mohsin Hamid

Living in a place like Pakistan, very often you meet people who are migrating abroad. And sometimes you'll ask their parents, you know - you didn't try to stop them? Like, why didn't you say, don't go - I'll miss you? Stay with me. And, you know, people say, well, it's best for them. They have to go. And parents, you know, take on that sadness because they know it's better for their children if they leave. — Mohsin Hamid

When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different. — Mohsin Hamid

We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive. — Mohsin Hamid

We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons. — Mohsin Hamid

If my daughter wanted to wear a headscarf and dress in a religiously conservative way, I would be heartbroken. But if she were to decide to do that and she were to live in a place where people said she couldn't do that, I would be entirely committed to her right to do so. — Mohsin Hamid

The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can. — Mohsin Hamid

Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that. — Mohsin Hamid

If the dominant political expression that we're seeing right now is of nostalgia and we know that nostalgia won't really work out, what happens is, we become depressed as individuals and societies - when we're depressed, we're much more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by demagogues and xenophobes. — Mohsin Hamid

I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned. — Mohsin Hamid

She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself. — Mohsin Hamid

It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back. — Mohsin Hamid

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves. — Mohsin Hamid

If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all. — Mohsin Hamid

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do. — 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. — Mohsin Hamid

In America there are people advocating for trans rights and people like Vice President Pence, who is vehemently opposed. In Pakistan, too, you have all kinds of folks - from flamboyant gay fashion designers and female Air Force pilots to the Taliban. A cross-dressed man used to be the top TV talk show host. It was actually quite radical. So the diversity of these societies is often lost on people. — Mohsin Hamid

think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is. — Mohsin Hamid

We keep the negative stuff because it's the negative stuff that's going to, you know, potentially kill us. That fin in the water - maybe it is a shark. That yellow thing behind the tree - maybe it is a lion. You need to be scared. — Mohsin Hamid

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes. — Mohsin Hamid

I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age. — Mohsin Hamid

I think the beard helps offset - it's the only hairstyle I can really pull off. But I'm often clean-shaven. I think, you know, for me, it's not that signifier. What's interesting to me though is although the beard isn't a signifier of that to me, other people very often think that it is. And so people in America might react differently. The, you know, border agents might react differently. The guys at airport security might react differently. — Mohsin Hamid

Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies. — Mohsin Hamid

Our countries are weaker: they cannot protect us from imported goods, they can't protect us from climate change, they cannot protect us from epidemics. These things cross borders. But the kind of cooperation that would protect us from those things was completely lacking and because of this there's been a backlash. People feel vulnerable. — Mohsin Hamid

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . . — Mohsin Hamid

The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want. — Mohsin Hamid

My mother has been to Mecca to perform her hajj; my dad hasn't. I come from a very liberal family, so even the people who are outwardly religious tend to subscribe to gender equality, the importance of open-mindedness, all that stuff. My family is generally nonprescriptive. — Mohsin Hamid

Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human. — Mohsin Hamid

What else is belief but direction? — Mohsin Hamid

Contemporary culture in Pakistan, just like in America, is continuously hitting us with scary stuff. And so we are utterly anxious. I think that it's very important to resist that anxiety, to think of ways of resisting the constant inflow of negative feelings, not to become depoliticized as a result but to actually work actively to bring into being an optimistic future. — Mohsin Hamid

Well, one thing that has changed is the number of people killed by terrorists in Pakistan. Civilians killed has gone down really quite dramatically. There was a newspaper article here about a month ago that got big headlines which said that civilian deaths from terrorism were down something like 80 percent or 90 percent from their peak of two or three years ago. — Mohsin Hamid

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response. — Mohsin Hamid

In some contexts in Pakistan maybe a beard is negative. It depends. And in some contexts in America maybe a beard is positive. I think there's certainly lots of hipster communities where having a beard makes me look a little bit less like a, you know, middle-aged fuddy-duddy. And there's some places in Pakistan where having a beard, you know, certain corporate contexts, certain social contexts, where it's not an advantage to have a beard. — Mohsin Hamid

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through — Mohsin Hamid

We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s. — Mohsin Hamid

Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks. — Mohsin Hamid

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s. — Mohsin Hamid

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write. — Mohsin Hamid

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. — Mohsin Hamid

The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it's important for writers and artists to try to imagine that. — Mohsin Hamid

I'm often surprised that, you know, you encounter all types of humanity. And very often, there are some very decent people who don't stereotype even when you might, in your own mind, have stereotyped them to think that they will. — Mohsin Hamid

Sometimes we are looking for somebody we can connect with on the basis of a shared past or a tradition or experience. And so finding that you're sitting next to someone very much like you in terms of where they come from is enormously reassuring. — Mohsin Hamid

I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak. — Mohsin Hamid

Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature - even if that nature is an urban environment. — Mohsin Hamid

In a way, every parent is sort of dependent on the benevolence of the society around them to take care of their children. — Mohsin Hamid

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories. — Mohsin Hamid

With movement, families get split. With the politicization of religion, spirituality gets diluted. With people intermarrying and falling in love outside of pre-existing defined groups, the tribe is disappearing. I'm not in favor of going back to those things, but you can't take those things away without putting something new in its place. So finding a way to make transience more acceptable, even beautiful is key. — Mohsin Hamid

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you. — Mohsin Hamid

If we try to 'protect ourselves', our nation-states begin to look like prisons. — Mohsin Hamid

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older. — Mohsin Hamid

One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom. — Mohsin Hamid

I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it? — Mohsin Hamid

The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture. — Mohsin Hamid

Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent. — Mohsin Hamid

I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives. — Mohsin Hamid

As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. — Mohsin Hamid

The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet. — Mohsin Hamid

Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists. — Mohsin Hamid

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids. — Mohsin Hamid

Life Lessons by Mohsin Hamid

1. Mohsin Hamid's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting different cultures and perspectives, which can help us to foster more meaningful connections with people from different backgrounds.
2. His stories also demonstrate the power of storytelling in helping us to make sense of our lives and the world around us.
3. Lastly, his novels show us the importance of hope and resilience in the face of adversity and challenge.