Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author who is best known for her novel The God of Small Things, 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...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 November 1961
CountryIndia
fighting america weapons
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.
religious years looks
If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.
real book thinking
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.
data world bills
Nilekani's technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.
fiction-and-nonfiction division concerned
There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.
political quiet speaking-out
To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out.
lonely alive
Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely.
heart writing ambitious
In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious.
thinking views political
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.
air rivers long
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
imagination racist anti-american
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.
fear should apprehension
But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
children army economic-sanctions
After using the 'good offices' of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the 'Allies' / 'Coalition of the Willing' (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!
gratitude thinking giving
Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.