Pankaj Mishra Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• A sustained engagement with the world, a sense of how it was and how it ought to be, and what has been lost, is imperative to good writing - I just don't know how you can be a serious writer without it.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Engagement, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I feel that I already have the life I love and I don't see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have - bigger advances, more prizes. It's a kind of madness. And the culture of prize-giving is so corrupt.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Giving, Culture, Might

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  9 Copy quote

• The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Unique, Ideas, West

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, The Liberator Magazine, Volume 7.2, Issue 22, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

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• Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the novel over many years and when I finally got to the last one, it didn't take much time.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Book, Years, Long

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

  4 Copy quote

• Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively, acting as part of mass-movements, that it's become hard for us to imagine a form of politics that is based on a high degree of introspection and self-examination.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Buddhism, Thinking, Self

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

  7 Copy quote

• 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 want to give that up. Everything else is just a bonus and often a distraction from the writing, reading, and traveling that gives me the most pleasure.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Reading, Writing, Giving

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  11 Copy quote

• The whole Hollywood conception of Tibet as this peace-loving country denies the complex humanity of the Tibetan people. Their ideas exist in a high degree of tension with impulses toward corruption, toward violence, toward all sorts of things. The Dalai Lama himself would say that he has to fight these impulses himself on a daily basis.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Fighting, Ideas

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American, I have been pampered enough myself to know how it can make your life too frictionless.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Fellowship, Foundation, Enough

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge instantly - and quite easily - so you can read a few articles on a few subjects and feel well informed but not actually know any of those subjects in any depth.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Offering, People, Important

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• I am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition which stood in the way of rational modern politics. I side with Gandhi, who wanted religious figures out of politics but also was suspicious of purely rational politics.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Religious, Antiques, Superstitions

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

  6 Copy quote

• Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity.

  Pankaj Mishra

  People, Waiting, Redemption

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

  4 Copy quote

• I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Reading, Writing, Years

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Bankers, Kind, Longing

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India’s, which is still not fully modern or totally organized, and has a great deal of tolerance for otherness in general, they find the cultural license to try other things, to be whatever they want to be.

  Pankaj Mishra

  People, Tolerance, Trying

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Responsibility, Thinking, Media

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast. You can move around the world but meet only people who speak your language, who share the same ideas, the same beliefs, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the world does not think or believe in or speak the everyday discourse of the elite.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Distance, Believe, Moving

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Two, Islam

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  10 Copy quote

• Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Passion, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think the Buddha presents an image of someone who believes in self-control. I think he's offering, perhaps, a critique of the romantic idea of the passions being this wonderful source of life or vitality that define you or your writing.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Believe, Passion, Writing

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die every day and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activities, you'd probably never get out of bed.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there are no fixed identities. He would have thought that someone calling himself a Buddhist has too much invested in calling himself a Buddhist.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Buddhist, Errors, People

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• When I moved to London in the 1990s, it had changed a great deal. Racism had become deeply uncool. But there has been a return of racism in the guise of "antiterrorism." People who look like myself are immediately suspect. I've become extremely self-conscious about going into crowded public places.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Self, Racism, People

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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 of uncertainties. It still is. My "Buddha book" expresses that. Perhaps that's what created this impression of earnestness.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Book, Thinking, Long

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• I meditate at airports because those are the places where I’m extremely tense, and I often meditate while I’m walking down the street. I have a thought and become aware of that thought and thereby create another level of awareness.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Airports, Levels, Awareness

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Latin, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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