She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.

— Mohsin Hamid

Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn't have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one wanted to believe he was the first so badly). Furthermore, I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. Furthermore, I became tough. Furthermore, I had fun. Furthermore, I learned so much. But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I'd danced enough. Furthermore, I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was.

— Mohsin Hamid

Some men drink the blood of other men, all I drink is wine.

— Mohsin Hamid

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

— Mohsin Hamid

Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.

— Mohsin Hamid

...status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

— Mohsin Hamid

Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.

— Mohsin Hamid

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

— Mohsin Hamid

Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticized, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.

— Mohsin Hamid

The end of the world can be cozy at times.

— Mohsin Hamid