Mohsin Hamid Quotes

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it's how it can bend.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

This is writing. You cut out chunks of your own memories, rework them, bleed into them, breathe into the raw clay, and hope the creature lives.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

The joy of writing drama is putting yourself into different people's heads.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

There's a powerful magic about being a writer that I still marvel at.