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
The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers. — 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
As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is… — 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 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
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
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
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'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
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
“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
