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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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