Pankaj Mishra Quotes

Critics have a responsibility to put things in a cultural and sociological or political context. That is important.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

I see only defects because I'm not following the scene as it were. I'm not following the other person. It's like the best thing to clarify this is the theater.

I'll talk all this craziness in my music, but when I have your attention, and you're listening to me, I'll talk about what I want to talk about and what I think we need to address.

What happens in the world affects me. Sometimes, that's part of the writing.

The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.

It is ridiculous ever to forget that you and your business are each implanted in the society of the moment. We cannot ignore the world of our time. We had better understand it.

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life?

If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

Write about what you know and care deeply about. When one puts one's self on paper - that is what is called good writing.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

I've always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don't stop writing, I say, 'Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about.’ With all that's going on, how could I stop?

I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.