I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don’t think it’s true of people who’ve grown up in cities so much; you may love a building, but I don’t think that you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth; it’s a different kind of love. Arundhati Roy Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it. Arundhati Roy Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes. Arundhati Roy Read Quote
I’m not ambitious. I don’t want to get anywhere, I don’t want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don’t want anything. I don’t want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought. Arundhati Roy Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all. Arundhati Roy Read Quote
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. Arundhati Roy Read Quote
