Quotes by Arundhati Roy

About Arundhati Roy:

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author who is best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. This novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Arundhati Roy

If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that.

Arundhati Roy

I have truly known what it means for a writer to feel loved.

Arundhati Roy

My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.

Arundhati Roy

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.

Arundhati Roy

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

Arundhati Roy

Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.

Arundhati Roy

I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're living an...

Arundhati Roy

I kind of resent the idea that the whole world has to be interested in the American elections.

Arundhati Roy

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

Arundhati Roy

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

Arundhati Roy

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?

Arundhati Roy

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

Arundhati Roy

As a writer, I have to go to a different place now. As a person... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought - and that requires a different set of skills.

Arundhati Roy

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.

Arundhati Roy

I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading.

Arundhati Roy

The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

Arundhati Roy

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.

Arundhati Roy

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Arundhati Roy

In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which s...

Arundhati Roy

Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just "human rights," and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

Arundhati Roy

Author Bio

  • NameArundhati Roy
  • DescriptionIndian novelist, essayist
  • BornNovember 24, 1961
  • CountryIndia
  • ProfessionNovelist; Writer
  • WorksThe God Of Small Things
  • AwardsNorman Mailer Prize