Pankaj Mishra Quotations

I grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra - places like Akola, Betul, Wardha, Jhansi; I thought the rise of provincial India would be an interesting subject to tackle.

The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.

Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.

Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world.

Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically.