Mohsin Hamid Quotes

In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.

I don't see much of myself in the traditional Western hero.

Who you are moment to moment is just a story.

You know, very often, if you look at the kinds of communications that they're getting in an ISIS recruiting video, the videos that, you know, that one hears of as radicalizing them, these are like action movies. And so in the sense, it's that by closing off the idea that young Muslims and particularly young Muslim men can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.

The thing that keeps me being a performer is my interest in society's obsession with identity, because I'm not sure that I really believe identity exists.

I think everyone self-mythologizes.

You see all these movies of white men saving the world all the time.

Here's the reality: There is always a credible threat, and terror can strike at any time, anywhere, especially as lone wolf attacks backed up by Islamic ideology become more prevalent.

Every young person needs to have a character that they can identify with and feel included by.

Through adopting radical extremism, some young men who previously felt humiliated and emasculated by their peers can now feel powerful and intimidating - and gain status, attention from young women, and the comradeship and solidarity of other young men like themselves.

Early on, people told me I was making Chinese people look bad. I've been living with this accent. I had already been doing standup for a while. I knew my voice already. I myself never wanted to make my accent the butt of the joke. I never want it to be, 'I'm laughing at your accent.'

Thousands of alienated young Muslims, most of them born and bred here but who regard themselves as an army within, are waiting for an opportunity to help to destroy the society that sustains them.

I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

I didn’t and don’t want to be a ‘feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.

Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

It's true that there is a rescue thing in people, and not just rescuing the family, which is kind of obvious from a biological point of view. But why is it that some people will jump into a freezing river and swim out to a downed plane for total strangers? What is that about? And it seems to be that it's part of your concept of who you are. That's why some people run into the burning buildings, because if they don't, their concept of who they are will be violated. They wouldn't be who they thought they were.