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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.

-Mohsin Hamid

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When People, Particularly Young

Mohsin Hamid

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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.

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Imagining The Future

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

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India And Pakistan

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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I Did Not Grow Up In Poverty. But I Did Grow Up With A Poor Boy's Sense Of Longing, In My Case Not For What My Family Had Never Had, But For What We Had Had And Lost.

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

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.

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.

As A Writer, I Am Constantly Aware That I Take My Life In My Hands With Everything I Do And Say. It's Just A Fact Of Life. For Me It Always Has Been.

Growing Up In Pakistan In The 1980s, I Lived In The Shadow Of A Tyrannical State.

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.

Pakistan Now Is Like A Horror Film Franchise. You Know, It's 'friday The 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist From Pakistan.' And Each Time We Hear Of Pakistan It's In That Context.

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

Only In Novels Can We Take Another Human Being Into Our Head And Create Something Jointly.

I Don't Think The Function Of Writing, At Least For Me As A Fiction Writer, Is To Say To People, "here's The Answer." It's Not An Op-ed.

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

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

Being A Writer Is Not The Point. Writing Is.

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

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

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

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.

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.

One Ought Not To Encourage Beggars, And Yes, You Are Right, It Is Far Better To Donate To Charities That Address The Causes Of Poverty Rather Than To Him, A Creature Who Is Merely Its Symptom.

It Seems An Obvious Thing To Say, But You Should Not Imagine That We Pakistanis Are All Potential Terrorists, Just As We Should Not Imagine That You Americans Are All Undercover Assassins.

I Am Not Much Of A Researcher As A Novelist; I Write Mainly From Experience.

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.

Sufi Poetry Is, In A Sense, Self-help Poetry About How To Live A Decent Life, How To Deal With Your Mortality.

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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.

I Felt Suddenly Very Young - Or Perhaps I Felt My Age.

Maybe We Are All Prospective Migrants. The Lines Of National Borders On Maps Are Artificial Constructs, As Unnatural To Us As They Are To Birds Flying Overhead. Our First Impulse Is To Ignore Them.

I Think There's A Natural Link Between The Fact That Our Self Is A Story That We Make Up And That We're Drawn To Stories. It Resonates, In A Way.

Novels Are Make-believe And Play For Adults.

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.

Literature Helps Us Transcend Ourselves.

If We Try To 'protect Ourselves', Our Nation-states Begin To Look Like Prisons.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

What Else Is Belief But Direction?

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.

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

If Differences Can Be Hidden, Perhaps They Aren't Differences At All.

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.

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.

I Think Fiction Allows You To Inhabit New Domains And It's You, The Reader Living In That Domain For A Few Days That Results In A Deeper Understanding As Opposed To The Novel Proclaiming This Is What It Is Right And This Is What Is Wrong.

Many Boys, Probably Most Boys, Have A First Love Before They Fall In Love With A Woman. It Begins The Moment Two Boys Realize They'd Die For One Another, That Each Cares More For The Other Than He Does For Himself, And It Lasts Usually Until A Second Love Comes On The Scene, Because Most Hearts Aren't Big Enough To Love More Than One Person Like That.

Falling In Love

I Think The Idea Of Migration Through Time Is Very Important Because Every Human Being Does That And It Unites Us With People Who Migrate Through Geography.

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.

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.

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

I Have A Funny Relationship To Language. When I Came To California When I Was Three I Spoke Urdu Fluently And I Didn't Speak A Word Of English. Within A Few Months I Lost All My Urdu And Spoke Only English And Then I Learned Urdu All Over Again When I Was Nine. Urdu Is My First Language But It's Not As Good As My English And It's Sort Of Become My Third Language. English Is My Best Language But Was The Second Language I Learned.

Funny Relationship

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.

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.

I Think That Things Were Getting Really Very Bad A Couple Of Years Ago, And There's Been A Very Significant Change In Response To That On The Part Of The Security Forces And The Government, But Particularly The Army. And You See Pakistan Actually Fighting Terrorism And Terrorists In A Much More Wholehearted Way Than Had Been Occurring Previously. It's Not Anywhere Close To Over Yet, But You've Seen A Big Change In The Antiterrorism Campaign Here.

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.

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.

All Human Stories Are Migration Stories Because Everyone Is A Refugee From Their Own Childhood.

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