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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

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I'm Often Surprised That,

Mohsin Hamid

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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.

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Like Many Of My Friends In The Pakistani Diaspora - And Many Of My Friends In Pakistan Itself, For That Matter - I Have Sometimes Looked At The Country Of My Birth And Wondered Whether Its Future Will Be One Of Steady And Sad Decline.

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Black And White

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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.

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The World Seems Concerned With Pakistan Primarily As An Actor In Global Attempts To Combat Terrorism.

Walking Is A Meditative Act. It's So Rare That We Allow Ourselves Just To Be.

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What Else Is Belief But Direction?

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

America's Strength Has Made It A Sort Of Gulliver In World Affairs: By Wiggling Its Toes It Can, Often Inadvertently, Break The Arm Of A Lilliputian.

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.

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.

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.

I Like The Idea Of An Open, International London That Thrives On Attracting Hard-working, Talented People But Has The Confidence To Tell Them They Must Play By The Same Rules As Everyone Else.

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

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

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.

Why The Brevity? Because I'd Rather People Read My Book Twice Than Only Half-way Through

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If You Have Ever, Sir, Been Through A Breakup Of A Romantic Relationship That Involved Great Love, You Will Perhaps Understand What I Experienced. There Is In Such Situations Usually A Moment Of Passion During Which The Unthinkable Is Said; This Is Followed By A Sense Of Euphoria At Finally Being Liberated; The World Seems Fresh As If Seen For The First Time Then Comes The Inevitable Period Of Doubt, The Desperate And Doomed Backpedaling Of Regret; And Only Later, Once Emotions Have Receded, Is One Able To View With Equanimity The Journey Through Which One Has Passed.

For Many People, There Is An Almost Power To Be Found In Prayer.

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

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

Uncertain Future

Novel Writing Is Solitary Work.

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.

I Think That We Live In A World - And This Is Something Which Living In Pakistan, Perhaps, Has Taught Me - And, You Know, We Live In A World Where There Is A Constant Feed From Social Media, The News, Etc., Of Things That Can Scare Us. And We Become So Anxious Because Human Beings Are Meant - Are Designed To Be Sensitized To Dangerous Stuff.

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

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.

The Monolithic View That Many Americans Have Of Pakistani Culture Is As Inaccurate As The Monolithic View That Many Pakistanis Have Of American Culture.

American Culture

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.

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

It Is The Effect Of Scarcity; One’s Rules Of Propriety Make One Thirst For The Improper.

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.

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.

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

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.

Novels Are Make-believe And Play For Adults.

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.

India And Pakistan

Americans Need To Educate Themselves, From Elementary School Onward, About What Their Country Has Done Abroad. And They Need To Play A More Active Role In Ensuring That What The United States Does Abroad Is Not Merely In Keeping With A Foreign Policy Elite's Sense Of Realpolitik But Also With The American Public's Own Sense Of American Values.

You Know, Very Often, If You Look At The Kinds Of Communications That They're Getting In An Isis Recruiting Video, The Videos That, You Know, That One Hears Of As Radicalizing Them, These Are Like Action Movies. And So In The Sense, It's That By Closing Off The Idea That Young Muslims And Particularly Young Muslim Men Can Be American Heroes, It Increases The Chance That They'll Try To Be Some Other Kind Of Hero. And That, I Think, Is Entirely Counterproductive.

If It Takes You Seven Years To Write Each Novel, You Need A Patron. And I Would Rather Have My Corporate Self As My Patron Than Any Arts Council Or Bestower Of Grants.

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

I Take Six Or Seven Years To Write Really Small Books. There Is A Kind Of Aesthetic Of Leanness, Of Brevity.

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.

The Ruins Proclaim The Building Was Beautiful.

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.

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 . . .

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

I Believe One Can Gauge A Book's Impact Only After About 10 Years.

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.

For A Combination Of Reasons, And Despite Evident Fondness For American Products And Individuals, My Impression Is That Most Pakistanis Have Extremely Negative Views Of The Us As A Geopolitical Player.

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.

I Don't Want To Be A Michael Moore-style Artist, Which Is Not To Disparage Michael Moore. But He Seems Rather Unsuccessful At Winning People Over Who Don't Already Agree With Him.

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.

Falling In Love

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.

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