Pankaj Mishra Quotes

Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

I personally think artists should criticize the government as much as possible since, unlike politicians, they do not have to obtain votes.

I can only hope that the American people who have often shown their liking for my work as a painter, realizing that their access to it is hindered by institutional and governmental control, will understand the compelling motives for my gift.

When people think of the American Identity, they don’t think of torture, they don’t think of illegal wiretapping … or many of the other things that have been happening in the last 6 years…. Singers are like the canary in the coal mine. When things are happening, they must be sung out.

The history of the application of laws designed to suppress the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of government can be invoked under them against great art or literature, scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

People use the guise of art, and artistic expression, to do all kinds of hateful things. It's like Trump and everybody else using the guise of humor to say hateful things, the excuse being, 'I was just being funny.'

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.

Art is where we make a stand. If we don't make it there, freedom of expression is lost for everyone - for artists, for journalists, and for everyday people.

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have.

To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

The U.S government hates rap music

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.

The idea you can tell a writer of a specific religion to stop writing about that religion is presumptuous.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.