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So In Many Ways, The Bombing At The End Of This Year And The Terrorist Attack Of Last Year In Peshawar Have Bookended Both Those Years In A Very Unfortunate Way. But At A Bigger Picture Since, The Impression In Pakistan Is That Things Are Actually Improving On The Terrorism Front Quite Dramatically.

-Mohsin Hamid

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So In Many Ways,

Mohsin Hamid

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So In Many Ways, The Bombing At The End Of This Year And The Terrorist Attack Of Last Year In Peshawar Have Bookended Both Those Years In A Very Unfortunate Way. But At A Bigger Picture Since, The Impression In Pakistan Is That Things Are Actually Improving On The Terrorism Front Quite Dramatically.

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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.

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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.

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Imagining The Future

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India And Pakistan

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American Culture

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Falling In Love

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Funny Relationship

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Literature Helps Us Transcend Ourselves.

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.

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

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

If An American Teenager Were To Come To Lahore, They'd Have Wildly Different Experiences Depending On Whom They Met. They Could Party And Get Drunk And Smoke Hashish With Some, While Others Would Say, "let's Get Some Religious Instruction."

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

When People, Particularly Young People And Especially Young Men, Can't Imagine Themselves As Heroes In Narratives That They Construct For Themselves, They Look To Be Heroes In Some Other Way. So Young Men In America Of, Let's Say, Muslim Background, Only A Tiny, Tiny Minority - So Small As To Be Almost Zero - Are Likely To Ever Commit Terrorist Acts.

Certainly, Historically, There Has Been More Attention Given In The International Media To Indian English-language Writers Than To Pakistani English-language Writers. But That, In My Opinion, Was Justified By The Sheer Number Of Excellent Writers Coming From India And The Indian Diaspora.

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.

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.

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.

For Me, Language Is About The Impossibility Of Communicating What We Precisely Wish To Communicate And This Gorgeous Attempt That We Make To Do That Anyway. I Love That We Will Never Say Exactly What We Mean, But We Will Forever Keep Trying.

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.

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.

If The Dominant Political Expression That We're Seeing Right Now Is Of Nostalgia And We Know That Nostalgia Won't Really Work Out, What Happens Is, We Become Depressed As Individuals And Societies - When We're Depressed, We're Much More Vulnerable To Be Taken Advantage Of By Demagogues And Xenophobes.

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.

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.

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.

Novels Are Make-believe And Play For Adults.

She Was Struggling Against A Current That Brought Her Inside Herself.

I Think I've Always Been Drawn To The Second Person. When I Was Growing Up And Playing With My Friends, The Usual Way We Interacted With Imaginary Worlds Was As Characters: A Bench Was 'your' Boat, Leaves On A Lawn Were The Fins Of Sharks Out To Get 'you.'

Our Countries Are Weaker: They Cannot Protect Us From Imported Goods, They Can't Protect Us From Climate Change, They Cannot Protect Us From Epidemics. These Things Cross Borders. But The Kind Of Cooperation That Would Protect Us From Those Things Was Completely Lacking And Because Of This There's Been A Backlash. People Feel Vulnerable.

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

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.

It Is Not Surprising That Most Pakistanis Do Not Support America's Bombardment Of Afghanistan. The Afghans Are Neighbours On The Brink Of Starvation And Devastated By War. America Has Shown Itself To Be Untrustworthy, A Superpower That Uses Its Values As A Scabbard For Its Sword.

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 . . .

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.

Television Has Given Pakistan A Truly Open National Forum For The First Time In Its History. Ideas Are Debated, Leaders Are Assessed And Criticised, And A Nation Of 170 Million People Is Finally Discovering, Together, What It Thinks.

In America There Are People Advocating For Trans Rights And People Like Vice President Pence, Who Is Vehemently Opposed. In Pakistan, Too, You Have All Kinds Of Folks - From Flamboyant Gay Fashion Designers And Female Air Force Pilots To The Taliban. A Cross-dressed Man Used To Be The Top Tv Talk Show Host. It Was Actually Quite Radical. So The Diversity Of These Societies Is Often Lost On People.

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

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

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.

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

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