Pankaj Mishra Quotes

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

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.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

I like complicated characters.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.

I like characters who are contradictory.

I see myself as a story teller.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

Every great story leaves you questioning. If all of the questions are answered, and everything is resolved, it's boring. There's nothing to talk about afterwards.

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

I want to give every single character the dimensions and complexity of a main character.

Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.

A well-written character is one where you don't know in which direction it's going; the character could spring a surprise any moment.

I just love characters that are complex, that you can dig into and keep itching the scratch and never quite be satisfied because they have enough going on with them that it's like a giant puzzle.

Whenever I do anything, even the most simple character, I need to twist it somehow, make it more challenging, in terms of psychology and storytelling. I can't just do it straight.

I am not interested in one-sided characters.

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

If you break things down to goodies and baddies, the baddies are always a bit more alluring in fiction, and that's true from a narrative point of view. But I wanted to write a novel about real life, and real life is a bit more nuanced than that.