A Quote by Mohsin Hamid

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through — © Mohsin Hamid
Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
I cannot read on a Kindle. I love the physical experience of holding a book, cracking it open, and the process of making the right half weigh less than the left half. I only read hardcover books because I like the resistance and the presence on a bookshelf.
What’s more, you’re loads better than you think you are.” “So why is it I get to thinking that way?” I puzzled. “That’s because you’re only half-living.” she said briskly. “The other half is still untapped somewhere.
There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book.
For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
Some people will say, "Why read a comic book? It stifles the imagination. If you read a novel you imagine what people are like. If you read a comic, it's showing you." The only answer I can give is, "You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?
I read the 'Kapoor & Sons' script in a half hour, forty five minutes. Not because I skimming through it... I read it like a book. By the end, I was blown away. I picked up the phone and said, 'This script is gold.'
I read '13 Reasons Why' in middle school, and the message of the book stuck with me: to treat people better because you never know what they're going through.
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.
I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.
He who writes distichs, wishes, I suppose, to please by brevity. But, tell me, of what avail is their brevity, when there is a whose book full of them?
In English, I never did the reading when it was assigned. If a paper was due on Friday, my attitude was, read half the book on Tuesday, the second half on Wednesday, and write the paper Thursday night. Sometimes, I'd just read the Cliff's Notes and skip the book altogether.
I was on a panel with Marshall McLuhan in Canada. Someone says, 'Mr. McLuhan, I read your book, and I disagree with you.' And he says, 'Oh, you read my book? Then you only know half the story.'
The only book I ever read cover to cover was The Pete Rose Story. I read half of The Lou Gehrig Story and then made a book report on it for four straight years.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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