Pankaj Mishra Quotes

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.

I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.

I'm never really happy with anything I do.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

Why'd you have to say that there's always someone who can do it better than I can And don't you think that I know that walkin' on water won't make me a miracle man

She was, in other words, the kind of girl who made the rest of us look bad, and whenever she glanced my way, I couldn't help but feel guilty, even though I hadn't done anything wrong.

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

I always feel as if I'm a disappointment: that people want a grand dame in furs like Barbara Taylor Bradford.

You can't write if you don't read.

We're taught at such a young age that you can always be better and that you're never perfect and that you're never good enough.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

I'd go to a bookstore, and I'd flip through flap copy, and I'd think, 'If this gal can get published, I can get published.'

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

And it is easy to believe you are not good enough if you listen to everybody else.

There's too much darkness in the world. Everywhere you turn, someone is tryin' to tear someone down in some way; everywhere you go, there's a feeling of inadequacy, or a feeling that you're not good enough. I want to bring a certain light to the world.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

I think that many things that go on in an art school have a tendency to undermine confidence, and that shouldn't be part of the ballgame, ever.

I generally find that comparison is the fast track to unhappiness. No one ever compares themselves to someone else and comes out even. Nine times out of ten, we compare ourselves to people who are somehow better than us and end up feeling more inadequate.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.