We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.
Mohsin HamidI did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.
Mohsin HamidYou can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.
Mohsin HamidI think that right now, the global political crisis that we see all over the place has to do with virulent nostalgia. Everywhere, people are talking about taking us back to the good old days. Whether that's the "caliphate," or Britain before the EU, or "Make America Great Again." But, we can't go back and many people wouldn't want to go back even if we could.
Mohsin Hamid