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 what's important and extraordinarily practical about Buddhism, is that it offers very concrete methods for people to work with. — 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
In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that… — 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
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
I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen… — 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
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 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
Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively,… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that… — 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 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
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
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
Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The… — 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
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 excessive rationality can be very dangerous. Certainly the kind of rationality we've seen in the last hundred years, and still… — 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
