Writing Quotes by Mohsin Hamid

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

— Mohsin Hamid

Novel writing is solitary work.

— Mohsin Hamid

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

— Mohsin Hamid

I think we need to radically reimagine the future - citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone.

— Mohsin Hamid

When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

— Mohsin Hamid

I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.

— Mohsin Hamid

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

— Mohsin Hamid

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

— Mohsin Hamid

I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past.

— Mohsin Hamid

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

— Mohsin Hamid

Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you…

— Mohsin Hamid

I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking…

— Mohsin Hamid

For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set…

— Mohsin Hamid

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who…

— Mohsin Hamid

Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It…

— Mohsin Hamid

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I…

— Mohsin Hamid

Walking is very good for writers. There's something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being…

— Mohsin Hamid

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the…

— Mohsin Hamid

I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But…

— Mohsin Hamid

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something…

— Mohsin Hamid

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read…

— Mohsin Hamid

“It is odd, isn’t it? Whenever I read something interesting, I tear out a piece and keep it as a talisman until…

— Mohsin Hamid

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the…

— Mohsin Hamid

Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But…

— Mohsin Hamid

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained,…

— Mohsin Hamid

You know, you get a bad review as a writer, you remember it for 10 years. You get a hundred good reviews,…

— Mohsin Hamid

“But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city,…

— Mohsin Hamid

As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's…

— Mohsin Hamid

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have…

— Mohsin Hamid

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as…

— Mohsin Hamid

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave…

— Mohsin Hamid

If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self…

— Mohsin Hamid

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…

— Mohsin Hamid

“I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of…

— Mohsin Hamid

The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would…

— Mohsin Hamid

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that…

— Mohsin Hamid

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many…

— Mohsin Hamid

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political…

— Mohsin Hamid