Arundhati Roy Quotes

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Arundhati Roy

Profession : Novelist

Birth : November 24, 1961

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

Arundhati Roy

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!'

Arundhati Roy

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

Arundhati Roy

Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again?

Arundhati Roy

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.

Arundhati Roy

I think people ease into this careerist professionalism, so if you're a writer it's your job to manufacture books as opposed to writing them and to go to festivals and spend your life emotionally invested in reviews or the awards. You have to shrink your universe in a way. To me, it's the opposite.

Arundhati Roy

All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care.

Arundhati Roy

For many people, the family is portrayed as the settled place of reasonable safety, but as anyone who has read 'The God of Small Things' would know, for me it was a dangerous place. I felt humiliated in that space. I wanted to get away as soon as I could.

Arundhati Roy

Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.

Arundhati Roy

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

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 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

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.

Arundhati Roy

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.

Arundhati Roy

I am very conscious that, from the time of 'The God of Small Things' was published 10 years ago, we are in a different world... which needs to be written about differently, and I really very much want to do that.

Arundhati Roy

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.

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

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

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.

Arundhati Roy

To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.

Arundhati Roy