Mohsin Hamid Quotes

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

To keep oneself safe does not mean to bury oneself.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

In the internment camp, there was nothing to do.

Because I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.

Protection is not a principle but an expedient

Why do people hanker for the home? - security, safety. But in the name of security and safety, they don't make homes, they make prisons - and they are the jailed and they are the jailers, but because they have the keys in their own hands, they think they are free.

There's capital controls and there's people control. So every time you think of a fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us, keeping us in.

By the way, a gendarme assured me this is not a prison.

He frosted under heavy guard.

For without you, I swear, the town Has become like a prison to me. Distraction and the mountain And the desert, all I desire.

Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.

A world without open country would be universal jail.

In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.

We need to build a wall...I don't mind having a big beautiful door in that wall...

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

For me, it's all about being in a tiny room with little windows. It's almost like you have to be in a prison.

You will never be completely free from risk if you're free. The only time you can be free from risk is when you're in prison.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.