129 Quotes by Aravind Adiga

Vishram is a building like the people living in it, middle class to its core. Improvement or failure, it is incapable of either extremity.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent – as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

It’s true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work – much like our politicians – and yet keep winning re-election to their golden thrones in heaven year after year.

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.

It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that’s not true at all any more. It’s one of the world’s fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.

I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again – from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this – that was the only way he could tolerate this cage.

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it’s a miracle when it comes out.

A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.

Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love – or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?