Mohsin Hamid Quotes

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

Words are a pretty blunt instrument. There's always going to be slippage between the words and the infinite complexities of a thought. As a writer, I find that frustrating, but as a social animal, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koue, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to piece the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion.

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

If you wish to fault the administration, it is that we didn't have a clear picture and we probably didn't do as clear a job explaining that we did not have a clear picture until days later.

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

Love is at once the most creative and yet simultaneously destructive force in the world, and thus, in our lives. And I don't mean the Hallmark sentimental type of love, although that is part of it. But a deeper obligation that we have to each other: the obligation to reflect our humanness at each other, to reflect back the things others show us and we, them.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Impossible just means they ain't thought of a name for it yet.

If I find something and feel as though I can contribute to [it] in a way and feel I'm in it, whatever that means, I'm expressing something that I feel is a way to exercise my talent and help communicate a role as a human being in a movie, I will do that.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

It's fun when you're driving, and people wave at you, and you wave back. I think you either like people or you don't. I mean, I don't want to put on sunglasses. That's why I'm in show business.

Our phones do play to our natural nervousness about being vulnerable to each other, but that doesn't mean that we can't we can't pull ourselves together, and say - we need to talk to each because it's in conversation, the most human and humanizing thing that we do, that empathy is born, that intimacy is born, that relationship is born.

I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.

Just because I'm not forever by your side doesn't mean that's not precisely where I want to be.

What I mean by art is the human act of doing something that connects us to someone else

If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.