Pankaj Mishra Quotes - Page 4

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Buddhism, Preoccupation, Very Powerful

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

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• We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in the past, as sentinels and embodiments of Enlightenment virtues of reason, dissent, and skepticism.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Eye, Past, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, America, Egypt

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Race, Tolerance, Insane

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Art, Men, Identity Politics

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Powerful, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, in our writing and thinking.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Thinking, East

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Home, Ignorance, Novelists

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using their privileges of free speech in the morally superior West versus pathetic wimps in repressive countries we don't like.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Mean, Progress

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated on the myth of history.

  Pankaj Mishra

  People, Used, Himalayas

  "'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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• In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Writing, Winning, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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