I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

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

Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving people the vote, that'll solve all our problems. In the end, that's just a silly, infantile notion.

Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.

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, in our writing and thinking.

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 degree of tension with impulses toward corruption, toward violence, toward all sorts of things. The Dalai Lama himself would say that he has to fight these impulses himself on a daily basis.