Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pankaj Mishra
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: February 9
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Serious
Lost
Sense
Imperative
Without
Imperatives
Writing
Sustained
Good
Engagement
World
Writer
Ought

More quotes by Pankaj Mishra

Image
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
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 technical view of the world.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly important upon which the future of literature, if not the world, depends. Buddhism tells you that this is just a foolish fantasy. So, I try not to think too much about Buddhism early in the morning. From noon on, I think about it.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
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
Image
I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are prey to false ideologies and national delusions.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
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
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 many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic department - and even many literary writers look and behave like young urban professionals and canny careerists.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
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
Image
As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all year long and get two weeks off! It's incredible.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Once you empower people and say,' Here you are, now you get to dream the great dream of becoming a full citizen with equal rights and radical improvement in your living situation,' you are creating an illusion which will break one day.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
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
Image
I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possible. I don't think the responsibility of the reporter or journalist is fundamentally different.
Pankaj Mishra
Image
In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America.
Pankaj Mishra