How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia Quotes

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“It is the first visit in many years for your son, finally a citizen of his new country and free to travel, and you try to suppress your undercurrent of resentment at his decision to absent himself from your presence in so devastatingly severe a manner. You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“... and time is the stuff of which a self is made.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“[…]when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in reading that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books[…]”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, ad there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so, we turn, among other things, to stories.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Look, unless you're writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama" looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama."

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“He whispers a benediction and breathes it into the air, spreading his hope for you with a contraction of the lungs.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“He was a man who discovered love through his penis.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware that this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, and there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son, and yes, your ex-wife, and you have loved the pretty girl, you have loved beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“...in any case over sufficiently long a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“You watch one after another of the ubiquitous, hyper-argumentative talk shows that fill your television, aware that in their fury they make politics a game, diverting public attention rather than focusing it. But that suits you perfectly. Diversion is, after all, what you seek.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia