Arundhati Roy Quotes

Every strategy for real social change – land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources … – has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.

Humans are animals of habit.

One beach-colored. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less.

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.

Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever.

Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war – 10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation – the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States.

Anything’s possible in Human Nature …Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It’s very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.