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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

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As A Society, You

Mohsin Hamid

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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.

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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.

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Funny Relationship

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The Ban On The Burkini, Which Is Basically A Wetsuit, Seems Particularly Ridiculous.

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Literature Helps Us Transcend Ourselves.

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We Should Be Very Skeptical Of People Who Want To Place Limits On How We Express Ourselves.

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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.

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Falling In Love

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.

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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.

Religion Is Not Something I Like To Talk About Publicly. One Reason Is The Politics, But Also I Think Spirituality Is Deeply Personal.

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.

We Are All Refugees From Our Childhoods. And So We Turn, Among Other Things, To Stories. To Write A Story, To Read A Story, Is To Be A Refugee From The State Of Refugees. Writers And Readers Seek A Solution To The Problem That Time Passes, That Those Who Have Gone Are Gone And Those Who Will Go, Which Is To Say Every One Of Us, Will Go. For There Was A Moment When Anything Was Possible. And There Will Be A Moment When Nothing Is Possible. But In Between We Can Create.

When We Aren't Collectively Imagining Hopeful Futures, Then The Way Things Are Going Almost Invariably Seems Negative And Frightening.

Novels Function And The Power Of Novels Function Because Of Their Stories.

Novel Writing Is Solitary Work.

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.

If We Want Things To Be Okay, We Will Have To Make Things Okay.

You Know, You Get A Bad Review As A Writer, You Remember It For 10 Years. You Get A Hundred Good Reviews, You Forget Them All. You Say Hello To A Hundred People In The City And It Doesn't Mean Anything To You. One Racist Comment Passes By, And It Sticks With You A Decade.

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.

When The Uncertain Future Becomes The Past, The Past In Turn Becomes Uncertain.

Uncertain Future

You're Never Rude,' She Said, Smiling, 'and I Think It's Good To Be Touchy Sometimes. It Means You Care.

My Earliest Memories Are Of Watching Star Trek And Mash While My Parents Barbecued Chicken In The Back Yard. I Was An American Kid, Through And Through.

We Need A Self Because The Complexity Of The Chemical Processes That Make Up Our Individual Humanities Exceeds The Processing Power Of Our Brains.

Islam Is Not A Race, Yet Islamophobia Partakes Of Racist Characteristics.

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.

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.

The Gun Of The Father Is Always The Undoing Of The Son.

In A Way, Every Parent Is Sort Of Dependent On The Benevolence Of The Society Around Them To Take Care Of Their Children.

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.

A Reader Should Encounter Themselves In A Novel, I Think.

Islamophobia, In All Its Guises, Seeks To Minimise The Importance Of The Individual And Maximise The Importance Of The Group. Yet Our Instinctive Stance Ought To Be One Of Suspicion Towards Such Endeavours. For Individuals Are Undeniably Real. Groups, On The Other Hand, Are Assertions Of Opinion.

I Think Walking Is Very Useful, Like Sleeping And Dreaming, As Something That's Important To My Ability To Write.

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.

Readers Don't Work For Writers. They Work For Themselves.

I'm Not Sure If Guys Are Supposed To Read Vanity Fair. I Feel Very Metrosexual With It But Am Not Sure It's In My Comfort Zone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Time Only Moves In One Direction. Remember That. Things Always Change.

I'd Rather Create A Miniature Painting Than A Taj Mahal Of A Book.

And I Ask Myself What It Is About Me That Makes This Wonderful, Beautiful Woman Return. Is It Because I'm Pathetic, Helpless In My Current State, Completely Dependent On Her? Or Is It My Sense Of Humour, My Willingness To Tease Her, To Joke My Way Into Painful, Secret Places? Do I Help Her Understand Herself? Do I Make Her Happy? Do I Do Something For Her That Her Husband And Son Can't Do? Has She Fallen In Love With Me? As The Days Pass And I Continue To Heal, My Body Knitting Itself Back Together, I Begin To Allow Myself To Think That She Has.

You're A Watchful Guy. You Know Where That Comes From?" I Shook My Head. "it Comes From Feeling Out Of Place," He Said. "believe Me. I Know.

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.

Love Is Transient Even On A Very Personal Level. We Lose Everyone That We Love. Sometimes We Drift Apart And Sometimes We Die.

Which Is Stronger, Politics Or Love? Is Like Asking, Which Is Stronger, Exhaling Or Inhaling? They Are Two Sides Of The Same Thing.

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.

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.

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.

I Was, In My Own Eyes, A Veritable James Bond — Only Younger, Darker, And Possibly Better Paid.

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.

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.

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.

A Beard Is Something That Is Almost Like A Mirror To The Viewer. When Someone Sees You Wearing A Beard, They're Seeing Something In Their Own Imagination Because It's Still Me Whether I'm Bearded Or Not.

There's A Reason Prophets Perform Miracles; Language Lacks The Power To Describe Faith.

The Ruins Proclaim The Building Was Beautiful.

When The Machine Of A Human Being Is Turned On, It Seems To Produce A Protagonist, Just As A Television Produces An Image.

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.

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.

I Think Wars, Climate Change, All That Stuff Is Going To Move People. And So I Wanted To Say, "what If The Migration Apocalypse Occurs And It Isn't An Apocalypse At All?" Maybe We Will Still Find Ways To Be Happy And For Our Children And Grandchildren To Thrive And The World To Move On.

When People Talk About The Death Of The Novel, They Are Speaking Of The Need For The Birth Of Something Different.

What Used To Help Us To Cope With Transience Was Stuff Like, Extended Families All Living In One Place, Or Very Strong Religious Beliefs, Or A Tribe That Would Outlive You. That Stuff Is Getting Weaker.

Childbirth Changed My Perception Of My Wife. She Was Now The Bloodied Special Forces Soldier Who Had Fought And Risked Everything For Our Family.

All Over The World, The Nativist Perspective Is Being Privileged Over Those Who Are More Recent Arrivals.

Capitalism Is Like The Law Of The Jungle With A Few Rules. There Isn't Another System That Works For Our Society But Left Unchecked, Capitalism Can Have A Dehumanising Effect.

We Can Open Up Our Computers And Skype With Someone, And We See Them. It's Like Looking Through A Window. And We Can Surf The Internet Through Our Phones, And It's Like Our Consciousness Is Far Away. Or We Can Step Through A Airplane Door And Be In Another Continent A Few Hours Away. So Technology Feels, To Me, Like The Doors Sort Of Already Exist, At Least Emotionally.

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.

I Push Against The Tree And Run Away, Stumbling, The Unreal Night Playing With Me, Gravity Pulling From Below, Behind, Above, Making Me Fall. And I Run Through A World That Is Rotating, Conscious Of The Earth's Spin, Of Our Planet Twirling As It Careens Through Nothingness, Of The Stars Spiraling Above, Of The Uncertainty Of Everything, Even Ground, Even Sky. Mumtaz Never Calls Out, Although A Thousand And One Voices Scream In My Mind, Sing, Whisper, Taunt Me With Madness.

When Terrorism Strikes, Divisive Anger Is A Natural Response.

Novels Are Make-believe And Play For Adults.

I Think Writing Is A Very Political Act. I Think That Any Writer Who Says It's Not, Is Simply A Writer Who Is Disavowing The Political Connotations Of What They Write.

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.

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