Pankaj Mishra Quotes - Page 3

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• I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction after all comes from a different, less rationally manipulable side of the brain. I am personally very attached to reactionary figures like Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, and Céline.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Thinking, Political Opinions, Brain

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Criticism, Asymmetry, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Art, Past, Egypt

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Buddhism has always been a religion for people who've worked their way through a cycle of materialism and still feel discontented and want more, or have questions that their state of prosperity is not answering.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Buddhism, People, Want

  "'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 people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving people the vote, that'll solve all our problems. In the end, that's just a silly, infantile notion.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Silly, Thinking, People

  "'The Buddah' & 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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

• 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

• 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 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

• 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

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• 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

• Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Reading, Writing, Emotional

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I’m neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American audience. I’m uneasily somewhere in the middle.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Anxiety, India, Selling

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

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• 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

• You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're able to do that you're stuck with adversarial politics that leads nowhere and creates ever greater violence.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Able, Violence, Greedy

  "'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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• There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a great example of that.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Spiritual, Self, People

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

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• I think excessive rationality can be very dangerous. Certainly the kind of rationality we've seen in the last hundred years, and still see on a daily basis when Madeleine Albright says that it's all right, we have to live with the idea of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dying because it contains Saddam Hussein.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Children, Thinking, Years

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• 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.

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• 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

• 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

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