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" The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist. "

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" National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. "

" Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. "

" In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. "

" Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies. "

" An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. "

" Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India. "

" As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories. "

" After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. "

" If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction. "

" Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests. "

" The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. "

" Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. "

" Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled. "

" My dominant feeling every day is one of great ignorance. "

" Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English. "

" Life in a Chinese village is much more organised because the Chinese Communist Party has a presence even in the remotest Chinese village - a presence of the kind that no governmental or non-governmental organisation has in Indian villages. "

" Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped. "

" For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life. "

" Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. "

" The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual. "

" The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962. "

" Indonesia's diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages. "

" In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support. "

" Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy. "

" Many writers from the suburbs of history, such as Ireland and Argentina, produced more original work than their counterparts in the United States; they still seem to. "

" Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career. "

" In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. "

" Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions - such as China, Vietnam, and Iran - look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria. "

" The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. "

" I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form. "