Mohsin Hamid Quotes

If I went to a regular job, if I was a secretary or something, I'd want to look good. I'd dress up for that part.

I do think that when you're specifically working in a country like South Africa, you have to be able to be aware of the cultural truth of what people are raised in and believe in and how they function within their society.

First off, I think nudity is taken differently in America, though they did make a fuss in England, too.

Whenever I visit my family in Canada, I remind myself that what many Americans would consider forthright, many Canadians would consider overbearing.

I will say, though, that San Francisco is a very friendly city. It's the kind of place where people smile at you and you can strike up conversations on the street, so there's always an adjustment when I come back to New York. If I smile at someone on the street in New York, then they think there's something up - like, "Why is she smiling?"

I think the Arab world has no personality cult situation going on that they have in much of the Western world, South America included. They are a culture of words and religion, and you won't see manycsa charismatic people on Al Jazeera, except for the ones who are now learned presenters. You see Arab leaders getting on TV - which was very hard for me working out how to do the part, since Arab leaders are looking somnambulant, staring into their microphone, almost as if someone's got a hand up their back.

I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.

I don't think a naked body is particularly shocking or interesting ... It's not the culture I was raised in. I was not brought up in the United States. I don't share the [attitude] that you can have graphic violence, but - God forbid - you see someone's nipples.

Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America.

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

Sometimes I'm afraid that my daughter might think that I get my hair done for a living.

I think it would count more, if we did less personal appearances.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

I really think if you have a tattoo you have to wonder about what kind of future you have ahead of you. As an employer, I wouldn't employ someone with tattoos as I would wonder what customers would think about them. For me, tattoos are just a way for people to find attention who haven't found another way in their life to achieve it by conventional means.

I'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally "become a New Yorker."

But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.

I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here [in America], and be happy.

We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

I think American men are more conscious of putting up a good impression. There's more of an earthiness to Englishmen. But Americans aren't afraid to come up and say, "Hi, I'd like to go out with you." Englishmen are far more sheepish about it.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.

My name is actually quite a popular name in Scotland. People elsewhere always think it's far more exotic than it is. In Scotland, it's a common name.

It is rather the nature of America - our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive - what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don't have confidence in who we are, why should they?

If you are really spontaneous, people will think you are mad. If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, people will think you are mad. If you go to a church and talk to a cross or to an image, nobody will think your are mad, they will think that you are religious. You are talking to a stone in a temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form.

Americans give you the violence, Europeans give you the sex. I think people have been saying that since the 70s. And I think it's kind of pathetic that Americans are still stuck - on the shock value of violence, when sex is such a natural thing for everybody.

It's always weird to eat something that is a pet elsewhere.