602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?

If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn't about 'rights', it's about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.

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.

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!'

Everyone thinks I live alone, but I don't. My characters all live with me.

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.

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.

Today, we seem to be striving towards injustice, applauding it as though it's a worthy dream, made sacred by the caste system.

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.