Pankaj Mishra Quotes

The whole celebrity culture thing - I'm fascinated by, and repelled by, and yet I end up knowing about it.

There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.

Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

Andy Warhol made fame more famous.

The strength of British theatre should be that these actors in their middle years know what they're doing and are good at it. Not rich, not famous, but making a living.

When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.

Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be the high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, I was struck by what I would learn.

You don't have to be rich and famous. You just have to be an ordinary person, doing extraordinary things. I'd like more people to know that it's there. Women's achievements still aren't recognised enough in many areas.

In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.

Of course I loved 'I Love Lucy' and saw every episode over and over again. I found it heartbreaking that Ricky got to be famous and have an exciting life at the Tropicana while Lucy was stuck in that terrible apartment with the Mertzes.

I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

Look at Gleason in The Honeymooners. He was humorous but the way he lived wasn't really humorous. He was a bus driver. Who wants to be a bus driver? He didn't have any money and he was not famous. But despite that, the show is humorous.

I get most of my news from the Jon Stewart Daily Show. It's the most level commentary you can find. You have to laugh, because it's all so true. It's the closest thing to a counterculture.

I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful.

A stand-up's job is to hold the mirror up to society and to look at what we're afraid of. That's why we had shows like 'All in the Family' and 'The Jeffersons.' We made fun of ourselves then.

I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

I'm largely interested in people who are just great actors, and they're not necessarily hugely famous.

Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

Exploitation films were famous for taking an issue an exploiting it because they could move much faster than a studio could. If there was any hot topic, they would run out and make a quick movie and make a buck on it, by changing it around and using it, in some way, to give some relevance.

English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.

Sonny and another Hells Angel who was at the meeting thought they were beyond a little patch so they headed down to a local tattoo shop in Oakland and were the first to get the famous One Percent tattoos.

Marilyn Manson is a mockery of American pop culture.

I have this fascination with being on the road, all things music, and the '70s. My favorite movie is 'Almost Famous.'

I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is 'In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.'