Top 22 Arundhati Roy Quotes

I think one of the saddest things that’s happening to literature is that it’s getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?

When I decided to write ‘The God of Small Things’, I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.

Today, we seem to be striving towards injustice, applauding it as though it’s a worthy dream, made sacred by the caste system.

Everyone thinks I live alone, but I don’t. My characters all live with me.

Years of imprisoning and beheading writers never succeeded in shutting them out. However, placing them in the heart of a market and rewarding them with a lot of commercial success, has.

I don’t want to play these games of statistics any more; I have done that. I don’t want to be imprisoned by that, or by the morality that is expected of activists. I have never been that pristine person, that role model.

I’m a social cripple in a cocktail party. My idea of a nightmare is people standing very elegantly dressed in a room with a drink in their hand. I’m just like, ‘Urghh!’

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.

Everybody can’t have the life of a normal, average American person in India – they can’t. So, it’s about egalitarianism. It’s about sharing things more equally. It’s about access to natural resources.

I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.

I could have lived anywhere in the world now if I wanted to.

In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I’m against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They’re ecologically unsustainable. And they’re hugely undemocratic.

The fact is that America’s weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.

There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.

I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there’s no such decision that ought to be made. It’s only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.

I would never, ever use a novel to do thinly disguised political information dissemination. For me, all these experiences, they sat in me, and they got broken down into my body, and I sweated it out. It’s not because I want to talk about ‘issues.’ For me, a novel is a way of seeing the world.

If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn’t about ‘rights’, it’s about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.