Mohsin Hamid

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

I think for any actor, for the roles they deeply, truly want? They always have to audition for them.

The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.