Quotes from Arundhati Roy

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it.

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again?

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.

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

Everybody can't have the life of a normal, average American person in India - they can't. So, it's about egalitarianism. It's about sharing things more equally. It's about access to natural resources.

...a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.

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!'

I don't want to play these games of statistics any more; I have done that. I don't want to be imprisoned by that, or by the morality that is expected of activists. I have never been that pristine person, that role model.

In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I'm against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They're ecologically unsustainable. And they're hugely undemocratic.

I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're living and what's going on there.

In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.

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.

Use your art to fight.

When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.

I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading.

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

Acceptance spells death to a writer.

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.

I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.

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.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.