A Quote by Pankaj Mishra

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 century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

Pankaj Mishra

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Any Beast Book Buyers Caste Century Class Close Closely Dependent Elite Elsewhere English Identified Indian Literature Long Middle Middle Class Nineteenth Century Peculiar Perhaps Powerful Produced Readers Really Ruling Russian Russian Literature Think Tiny Upper Upper Middle Class Writing

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Pankaj Mishra
Indian - Novelist
Born: 1969

It's strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they've fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.

Charles Murray

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

Tracey Ullman

Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.

Tom Stoppard

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

Billie Joe Armstrong

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

George Orwell

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

Karan Mahajan

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

Adrian McKinty

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

Glen Duncan

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

Joseph Brodsky

Christian Science has always appealed to the middle-classes and the upper middle classes. In part, this is because it requires a certain amount of education to study 'Science and Health' to the degree that Christian scientists do. It's not an easy book to read! It's 700 pages, and it's written in a nineteenth-century manner and diction.

Caroline Fraser

The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.

Michelle Alexander

A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.

Raymond Williams

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

Sherman Alexie

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Ed Miliband

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.

Margo Jefferson

A Quote by Pankaj Mishra

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