Selected interviews with Mohsin Hamid:
2024
"Race is something we've invented into existence. It has a terrible power. But we can also, because we've imagined it into existence, imagine it out of existence. And I think that future generations probably will." MSNBC Ali Velshi interview on The Last White Man (video)
2022
"The heart of this book, The Last White Man, in a sense, is it's a meditation on loss. It's a musing about loss. What is it to lose something, and how do we explore that? And can we create dignity around the idea of somebody losing something, even if the thing being lost is not something that we wish to dignify? And to me, that's very interesting because it's a fundamental question that we face as human society today." Ezra Klein interview on The Last White Man (audio)
"The dominant modes of mass-reproduced storytelling in our historical moment are the screen storytelling modes: film and, even more, television. By their very nature, these modes tend to emphasize what things look like and how people speak. They also come to us more fully imagined: They present worlds that appear to be like the world we inhabit. This suggests to me that literature might flourish by focusing on other things, perhaps less on physical description and dialogue, and perhaps more on how what we call reality is an interior construct, but above all on the possibilities that come from being only partially imagined in its transmitted state. Written fiction looks nothing like the world it describes. The reader imagines that world from letters and spaces and punctuation marks. Literature, it seems to me, can thrive by opening up the space for co-creation on the part of the reader, by inviting the reader to imagine, by being the mode of storytelling that involves two people playing make-believe together, the reader an active shaper, a dancer in a dance, and not a viewer, seated, observing." New York Times interview on The Last White Man
"I think that race is an imagined construct that flattens people. Why would we want such a construct? Who benefits from having such a construct? Race simplifies, often in binary terms. It's the original zero/one, the original binary code. It's machine language, sorting language, for the most important commodity: human beings. People are far too complex for that algorithm to do anything but harm." New Yorker interview on The Last White Man
2017
"Yes I'm pro-migrant. I personally tend to believe that there is a right to migration in the same way that there's a right to love whom you like, to believe what you believe, and to say what you want to say." NPR Morning Edition interview on Exit West, migration, fear, the political similarities between Pakistan and America, and the importance of democratic activism (audio)
2016
"Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. We are surrounded by nostalgic visions, violently nostalgic visions. Fiction can imagine differently.... We certainly need it now. Because if we can’t imagine desirable futures for ourselves that stand a chance of actually coming to pass, our collective depression could well condemn humanity to a period of terrible savagery." New Yorker interview on Exit West
"I understand that people are afraid of migrants. If you're in a wealthy country, it's understandable that you might fear the arrival of lots of people from far away. But that fear is like racism: it's understandable, but it needs to be countered, diminished, resisted. People are going to move in vast numbers in the coming decades and centuries. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will change, and billions will move. We need to figure out how to build a vision for this coming reality that isn't a disaster, that is humane and even inspiring." Lit Hub interview on Exit West
2015
"One day the human beings of planet Earth will look back at our era and think of us, those who claim to love freedom but who live in societies that legalize migrant detention and deportation, with the same puzzlement that we think of those who lived in societies that legalized slavery." New York Times interview on reading the New York Times
2013
"I don't believe in 'reality' as such. What we call 'real' is something our minds create. So the whole notion of 'realism' is an interesting one. In my novels, I have tended to build seemingly 'realistic' narratives inside 'unreal' frames." Los Angeles Review of Books interview on first three novels
"The beautiful thing about writing is that it's a global community and on your bookshelf are all the teachers you could possibly want." BBC Talking Books interview on first three novels (audio)
"In a weird way, Lahore is a big river city like the various American cities that have to do with the Mississippi. Blues territory, in other words. The blues is pitched with the emotions and resonance and feeling of a lot of Punjabi folk music, which is what I grew up with." New York Times interview on current interests
"The Sufi poem, sort of Sufism in a nutshell, is Islamic mysticism where love is used as the prism for relating to the universe. And it generally expresses itself in the form of love poems, which are second-person addresses, very often, and quite often nameless second-person addresses." Los Angeles Times interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"For so long we've talked about 'the city' and we've used cities like New York or London as our template for our universal conversation about cities, and I was thinking, 'Well, maybe Lahore actually is quite typical of cities around the world now. Maybe I can use Lahore as a template for this global city.' And that's what I've tried to do." NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (audio, and also transcript)
"It's poetry's respect for economy that I'm after... but without abandoning fiction's love for storytelling." Time Out Chicago interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"There's a material improvement that is going on. And I think it can't be denied. The problem, though, is something else. I think the problem is more psychological or almost spiritual, you could say. There's a kind of spiritual and mental health crisis that's taking place." NPR Morning Edition interview with Steve Inskeep on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Aisa (audio, and also trancript)
"I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity." NPR Morning Edition essay by Steve Inskeep on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Aisa
"I feel as a human being I can perceive humanly about things without being overly constrained about the notion of there being a 'West' and an 'East.'" The Atlantic interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"I think the self-help book form fits with the 'you' naturally. The oldest self-help book forms, which are religious self-help book forms, often employ it. So whether you look at a direct address to the reader in sacred texts, or you look at Sufi poetry... it makes you aware of the relationship between reader and writer." Wall Street Journal interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"Life isn’t just about the minimisation of risk... I still prefer it here because these are the people I want to spend my life with." New Zealand Listener interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Risin Asia
"In today's world, where people are watching TV, they are on Twitter, and they are absorbing lots of different types of things, we need new kinds of novels. That's what I'm trying to do." Asia Society interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"I couldn't shake this notion that novels are often offered to readers as a form of self-help, that literary novels are read sometimes, or at least marketed, as if to say: 'if you read this it'll be good for you.'" Granta interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (audio)
2012
"It can be either very close and very near, or you can zoom back to a cosmic, almost religious text." NY Daily News article on speaking to Jay McInerney about How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"Not having any names in the novel, except for continent names, was a way for me to de-exoticize the context, to see it fresh." New Yorker interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"What is not okay is that out of that fear, you say something you do not believe in." Express Tribune article on a talk for university students in Lahore
2011
"I spend a long time on books because I'm trying to figure out how to write them as I go along." BBC Radio 4 Book Club program on The Reluctant Fundamentalist (audio)
"What shocks me about America, about the way America is headed, is that in some ways it's becoming increasingly Pakistan-like." Radio Open Source interview with Christopher Lydon on a Pakistan-like trend in America (audio)
2010
"I was in Bombay and I had to spend the morning at the police station and the evening hours on national television." NPR Morning Edition interview on advocating peace between Pakistan and India (audio)
2009
"It may just be that I'm a seven-year novelist." BBC World Book Club program on The Reluctant Fundamentalist (audio)
2007
"Many people have said it feels like a thriller. The reason for that is we are already afraid." Booker Prize Foundation interview on The Reluctant Fundamentalist
"I read a lot as a kid, everything from children's books, Charlotte's Web and The Wind in the Willows, to, as I got older, reading swords and sorcery." Barnes & Noble Studio interview on life, influences, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (video)
"As someone who is naturally split between two cultures, the fact that the cultures are becoming so increasingly hostile to each other makes me much more unsettled within myself." NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on The Reluctant Fundamentalist (audio)
"I believe that the core skill of a novelist is empathy: the ability to imagine what someone else might feel. And I believe that the world is suffering from a deficit of empathy at the moment." Harcourt interview on The Reluctant Fundamentalist
"I write my first few drafts from scratch every time, incorporating elements from memory, and drafts can be so different as to be almost different novels." Hamish Hamilton interview on The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2001
"I'll work on a study for three or four months, finish it and then go back to Pakistan and write." New York Observer profile on Moth Smoke and working at McKinsey
2000
"The book explores the idea of how you arrive at truth with conflicting narratives, which is what you do in law." Harvard Law Bulletin profile on Moth Smoke and law school
"I didn't like being programmed for a profession." Globe and Mail profile on Moth Smoke, college, law school, and McKinsey
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