Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

The self we create is a fiction. On this point, religion and cognitive neuroscience converge. When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as the television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional construct, but it also recognizes that thinking of itself as such might cause it to disintegrate.

War would soon erode the facade of their building as though it had accelerated time itself, a day's toll outpacing that of a decade.

stories of evil can be projected on them with as little difficulty as stories of good.

It's easy to be an idealist when you drive a Pajero.

Would you like your money starched, sir? Box or hanger? Thanks for using GloboBank.

but I would suggest that it is instead our solitude that most disturb us, the fact that we are all but alone despite being in the heart of a city.

I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you—an American—will agree, it is the thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's details.

with towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton such as this, to feel this exquisite sensation on their naked stomachs and thighs, towels that felt as if they had never been used before and might never be used again.

Not that he isn't horrible to most of the planet, he is. But if Ozi loves you, you know it. You can swim in it, get a tan. Or rest in its shade, if you'd rather.

But even now the city's freewheeling virtual world stood in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people, to those of young men, and especially of young women, and above all of children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.

Nadia's experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did.

She had, as was by then usual for her, been wearing her black robe, closed to her neck, and he had, as was by then usual for him, been wearing a size-too-small white T-shirt, pinned to his lean chest and stomach, and she watched him and he had circled her, and they had gone to his place that night, and she had shuffled off the weight of her virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss.

It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. War

In Pakistan, my friends and family are frightened, as they should be when the

I love it when you talk about where you come from," she said, slipping her arm through mine, "you become so alive.

PARENTS FIRST MET they were

that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.

Perhaps it is in our nature to recognize subconsciously the link between mortality and procreation—between, that is to say, the finite and the infinite—and we are in fact driven by reminders of the one to seek out the other.

I reflected that I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country's constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable.

and inside it were Nadia and Saeed, who had run from war already, and did not know where next to run, and so were waiting, waiting, like so many others.

The world will not fail if Pakistan fails, but the world will be healthier if Pakistan is healthy.

Saeed would pray with his father and the men, and prayer for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father.

Hoarse voice, from intimacy's border with asthma: parched beaches, dust whipped by the wind. Very sexy but not much to drink.

even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.