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
Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance… — 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 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
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
Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world. — 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
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
The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm… — 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
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 internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it's read all over the world.… — 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
