Mohsin Hamid Quotes

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

There are only five notes in the musical scale, but their variations are so many that they cannot all be heard. There are only five basic colors, but their variations are so many that they cannot all be seen. There are only five basic flavors, but their variations are so many that they cannot all be tasted. There are only two kinds of charge in battle, the unorthodox surprise attack and the orthodox direct attack, but variations of the unorthodox and the orthodox are endless. The unorthodox and the orthodox give rise to each other, like a beginningless circle-who could exhaust them?

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

The last person to stand still and repeat himself was Walt Disney. He refused to repeat himself. So to think that he'd be making the same kind of film in the year 2001 that he made in 1941 is absurd.

The multiplicity of ideas is what I'm interested in.

Imagination is an instrument of survival.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

There are literally as many ideas as there are organisms.

Having examined the principal points in which the several tribes of the human species differ from each other... I proceed to inquire whether the diversities enumerated ... are to be considered as characteristic distinctions coeval with the origin of the species, or as a result of subsequent variation; and in the event of the latter... whether they are the effect of external... causes, or of native or congenital variety.

My work today is perceived as being classic, but when I first started out, it was a break from the norm. Since then, I have continued to reinvent myself. I don't change my style, but I allow it to evolve.

What makes a book unique isn't always about having one big grand new idea. It's about combining many different ideas in new and interesting ways.

If you stick with one sound and one way of working, how will you ever progress?

It's amazing to see how if we don't open our minds to something different, we wont evolve as a species.

I'm always looking for a chance to do something different. I don't necessarily want to repeat myself, at any time, and I don't want to just do the same guy, over and over and over again. I want to be able to do different things and to evolve and constantly try to find those roles.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count.

I believe that one of the characteristics of the human race, possibly the one that is primarily responsible for its course of evolution, is that it has grown by creatively responding to failure.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

I'm constantly changing up my show. It's never the same.

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

"If we had not created a set of people against another the world would have been corrupt", and "against" here means two things: Against in the fact that they are challenging you with their diversity, challenging your intelligence and to challenge is not negative, it can be very positive depending on how you are challenged.

Every ripple on the ocean, every leaf on every tree, every sand dune in the desert, every power we never see.