Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so, we turn, among other things, to stories.

Fat is a small word which belies its size in the girth of its connotations. Fat implies a certain ungainliness, an inefficiency, a sense of immobility, a lack of industry, an unpleasant, unaesthetic quality; unmotivated, unloved, unnatural, unusual, uninspired, unhappy, unlikely to go places or to fit, under the ground with a heart attack at fifty-five. In short, fat somewhat paradoxically involves the lack of many attributes which, you must concede, are generally held to be good.

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

When my turn came, I said I hoped one day to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability; the others appeared shocked, and I was forced to explain that I had been joking.

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

But surely it is the gist that matters; 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.

Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.

You see, it is my passionately held belief that the right to possess property is at best a contingent one. When disparities become too great, a superior right, that to life, outweighs the right to property. Ergo, the very poor have the right to steal from the very rich.

In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

It seemed to me then—and to be honest, sir, seems to me still—that America was engaged only in posturing. 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…. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only in the rest of humanity, but also in your own.

Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?

Some men drink the blood of other men, all I drink is wine.

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

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.

Glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously...

A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery.

The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.

She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.

Didn't you tell me smoking ruined your stamina as a boxer? ... Ruined is a strong word, I'd say. ... It helps fight boredom. It gives you more to do and less time to do it in.

Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honor the goodness of the men who raised them

like Pakistan, America is, after all, a former English colony...

A revolver is) just a tool, really, like stapler. A stapler that punch through a person. Pin them. Drive blunt metal through flesh and bone.

Language lacks the power to describe Faith.

They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.