Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

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

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

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.

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.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

The four places I've called home in my life have been Lahore, London, New York and California. And I have a very strong tie to each one of those four places.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there.

I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

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.

Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.

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

Secrets make life more interesting. You can be in a crowded room with someone and touch them without touching, just with a look, because they know a part of you no one else knows. And whenever you're with them, the two of you are alone, because the you they see no one else can.

You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.

Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.

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

What else is belief but direction?

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.