I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life… — 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
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
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
Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era -… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly… — 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
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
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
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
