The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading.… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Most writers have very little that's important or valuable to offer; most of them are just repeating each other. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I’m neither flattering the Indian audience… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
A sustained engagement with the world, a sense of how it was and how it ought to be, and what has been… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The whole idea of mindfulness is all about having a second-level monitoring of your thoughts and being able to recognize them as… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American,… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“The United States, the Spanish-American writer George Santayana wrote, ‘has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think the Buddha presents an image of someone who believes in self-control. I think he's offering, perhaps, a critique of the… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Quoting the Slavophile Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (‘To destroy a people, you must sever their roots’), Awlaki claimed that Muslims ‘are suffering… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions.… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
So much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“The recent explosions, from India to the United States, of ressentiment against writers and journalists as well as politicians, technocrats, businessmen and… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and I don't… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine’s encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except, perhaps, in the Silicon Valley mansions… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
“History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially enlist.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share
