Mohsin Hamid Quotes

...it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is.

What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

A thing either is what it appears to be; or it is not, but yet appears to be; or it is, but does not appear to be; or it is not, and does not appear to be.

That which is cannot be true.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit.

Being is like pretending.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

Marilyn Monroe wasn't even her real name, Charles Manson isn't his real name, and now, I'm taking that to be my real name. But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

The source of all the material comes from nothingness, illusion is working more on things you can prove. That's the principle, the essence of life, it is actually an illusion, not immaterial. That's worth pursuing. So illusion is not nothing. In a way, that is the truth.

Very few of us are what we seem.

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

Now it's clear to me/ that everything you see/ ain't always what it seems.