Pankaj Mishra Quotes

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

Pankaj Mishra

• Writing
• Kind
• Wisdom

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Quotes to Explore

• I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

  

  Ed Westwick
  • Work
  • Writing
  • Poetry

• Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.

  

  Barry Ritholtz
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Real

• Turn your wounds into wisdom.

  

  Oprah Winfrey
  • Wisdom
  • Turn
  • Wounds

• I used to kind of go for it, right? Like, I'd be the one who would say, 'All right, there's Kate Moss. I'm going to try to make out with her.'

  

  Dan Colen
  • Kind
  • Right
  • Try

• All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Writing
  • Storytelling

• I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.

  

  Aaron Sorkin
  • Time
  • Good
  • Writing

• When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.

  

  J. Michael Straczynski
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Space

• It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.

  

  Naomi Klein
  • Time
  • Long
  • Writing

• I'm not the kind of director who aims to send a message out.

  

  Park Chan-wook
  • Kind
  • Director
  • Message

• With age comes common sense and wisdom.

  

  Nas
  • Age
  • Wisdom
  • Common Sense

• Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.

  

  Kat Edmonson
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Process

• My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.

  

  Kate Atkinson
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Women

• As much as I enjoy traveling and playing on stage as an artist, I really find my true sense of purpose in a room writing a song.

  

  Sam Hunt
  • Writing
  • True
  • Song

• Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.

  

  Hanya Yanagihara
  • Life
  • Work
  • Writing

• Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.

  

  M. Night Shyamalan
  • Writing
  • Money
  • Art

• When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.

  

  Salman Rushdie
  • World
  • Writing
  • Weird

• I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.

  

  K. A. Applegate
  • Time
  • Long
  • Writing

• When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

  

  Joanne Rowling
  • People
  • World
  • Kind

• "Prison Break" has been a really great experience because of the writers. I think that in television, you can have great directors, really good actors, but if it's not on the page... I think a series lives and dies in writing.

  

  William Fichtner
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Break

• Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering "who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?"

  

  Chuck Berry
  • Country
  • Black
  • Audience

• Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and cartoons and comic books, whatever it is that you love. Most of the way we live our lives involves looking for pleasure and beauty and happiness and affection. Real artists don't use reflexive clichés about things. It's about honoring the reality of people's lives, which defies conventions and clichés and expectations. People are interesting, period.

  

  Daniel Mendelsohn
  • Thinking
  • Real
  • Book

• The woman of tomorrow will be efficacious, seductive and without contest superior to man. It is for this woman that I conceive my designs.

  

  Paco Rabanne
  • Men
  • Design
  • Seductive

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

  

  Pankaj Mishra
  • Writing
  • Kind
  • Wisdom