think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.
Mohsin HamidYou 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.
Mohsin HamidWhy the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
Mohsin HamidThe anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.
Mohsin HamidFor if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.
Mohsin Hamid