A Quote by Pankaj Mishra

Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to.

Pankaj Mishra

Quote Topics

Able Bad Bad Writing Basically Best Control Does Emotion Feeling His Intellectuals Many Passion Passions Polemics Public Raw Raw Emotion Results Richer Someone Something Superman Tame Than Them Think Too Turn Untamed Vision Vulnerable Which Writers Writing

Quote Author

Pankaj Mishra
Indian - Novelist
Born: 1969

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

Dan Harmon

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

William S. Burroughs

That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.

C. S. Lewis

It's too bad that there aren't as many light comedies around in the movies as there were when I was making pictures like 'The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.' The boys are just not writing them. Many writers are more serious now than they used to be, and that's showing up in all phases of entertainment.

Rudy Vallee

The current state of music journalism is not bad, but it's not great at all. Some of the hip-hop stuff people get into is exciting, because there's a passion and there's something to explain to a more mainstream audience, so you get these passionate writers who want to express their love for rap and hip-hop, which is cool. But there are too many magazines, and the access has been diminished, so the quality of profiles has gone way down. Internet stuff can be really good, though. I like the dialogue between fans on the Internet. I think that's the best rock writing that's going on right now.

Cameron Crowe

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

Lev Grossman

I think you should start the first 90 minutes of Raw with a Paul Heyman promo and the second 90 minutes of Raw with Brock Lesnar wiping out the entire roster. But then again, that's my vision for Monday Night Raw.

Paul Heyman

When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.

Nico Muhly

Human emotion is more interesting than anything. Everything that is so overtly sexual is not real. Real emotion is sexy. It's vulnerable and raw.

Banks

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.

Amy Bloom

I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. [...] The other problem I have is fear of writing. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. [...] Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. [...] It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.

Fran Lebowitz

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

Robert B. Parker

I am a very emotional person. I basically think and feel in emotion, so writing is much easier for me than communicating by voice or by talking to somebody just because I can really get into the emotion more succinctly with writing. So I guess that's what makes me a better writer than speaker.

Kelly Oxford

The usual devastating put-downs imply that a person is basically bad, rather than that he is a person who sometimes does bad things. Obviously, there is a vast difference between a "bad" person and a person who does something bad. Besides, failure is an event, it is not a person - yesterday ended last night.

Zig Ziglar

I think that writers are best served by sticking to their writing. Not having loads of theories about the best way to position the writing. I think that if the writing is good and the point of view is strong, the writing is going to take care of itself.

Hilton Als

For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.

Woodrow Wilson

A Quote by Pankaj Mishra

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors