It is this capacity for relentless self-criticism that should be - everywhere - the true measure of intellectual freedom and cosmopolitanism, not the….

We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in the past, as sentin….

I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire soci….

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fi….

Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular ….

Christianity and Islam are concerned with the idea of justice, which can turn into political justice, social justice, economical justice, and so on. ….

The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it’s almost i….

We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside..

Once you empower people and say,' Here you are, now you get to dream the great dream of becoming a full citizen with equal rights and radical improve….

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - w….

Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or w….

I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This i….

The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers..

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to re….

I think the Buddha presents an image of someone who believes in self-control. I think he's offering, perhaps, a critique of the romantic idea of the ….

We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic department - a….

A sustained engagement with the world, a sense of how it was and how it ought to be, and what has been lost, is imperative to good writing - I just d….

Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to In….

Buddhism has always been a religion for people who've worked their way through a cycle of materialism and still feel discontented and want more, or h….

You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly important upon which the futur….

If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just an insignificant creature in the wh….