We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic department - and even many literary writers look and behave like young urban professionals and canny careerists.

If you belong to a small country that is geopolitically not that important, or strategically not that important, you have no place among nations. Those countries are neglected and left to fend for themselves.

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

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

I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated on the myth of history.

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 film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.