I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
Mohsin HamidRead
I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The younger generation of writers is showing greater courage by exploring deeper character development in response to superficial portrayals in cinema.
Mohsin Hamid highlights the evolving courage among young American writers who are compelled to create more profound and complex characters in their works. This arises as a reaction to the often shallow storytelling found in films, urging writers to investigate the underlying essence of humanity and identity in their narratives.
Themes
CourageCharacter DevelopmentWritingCinemaGenerationDepth
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on modern literature, I quoted Mohsin Hamid to emphasize the importance of character depth in storytelling.
More from Mohsin Hamid
All quotes →When the forces are aligning against hybridity, it harms everyone, as we are all migrants. Growing up in Pakistan, I know just how oppressive that kind of puritanical mindset can be.
Mohsin HamidRead
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 HamidRead
Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable.
Mohsin HamidRead
Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.
Mohsin HamidRead
I think that when we take the long view, the notion that some people are deemed less worthy of being able to move - to not have the right to cross borders - over time, that's going to seem as outmoded and as unfair, really, as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination.
Mohsin HamidRead
Similar quotes
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
Richard BachRead
Passion lends them power, time means to meet, tempering extremities with extremes sweet.
William ShakespeareRead
"Beauty fades," my father would tell me, "but dumb? Dumb is forever."
Judy SheindlinRead
If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank.
William Dean HowellsRead
I'm a very positive person, but this whole concept of having to always be nice, always smiling, always happy, that's not real. It was like I was wearing a mask. I was becoming this perfectly chiselled sculpture, and that was bad. That took a long time to understand.
Alicia KeysRead
Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.
Samuel Gridley HoweRead