The internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it's read all over the world. Who knows how big th….

I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between ….

Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, ….

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest ….

There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a grea….

Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the novel over many years and when I fin….

I feel that I already have the life I love and I don't see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have - bigger a….

What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassio….

The whole Hollywood conception of Tibet as this peace-loving country denies the complex humanity of the Tibetan people. Their ideas exist in a high d….

Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shar….

People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast….

Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assum….

I think what's important and extraordinarily practical about Buddhism, is that it offers very concrete methods for people to work with..

I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using their privilege….

The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there are no fixed identi….

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world..

I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full of uncertainties. It….

So much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in the world and it has not been done before ….

I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth cen….

The whole idea of mindfulness is all about having a second-level monitoring of your thoughts and being able to recognize them as being negative or ha….

Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance ….