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 india village
As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.
war water landscape
The genocide will not necessarily take the form of war, or death camps. Most likely it will take the form of ecocide, in which landscapes are devastated and the populations that live there slowly starve or turn upon each other savagely because there isn't enough food or water to go around.
writing thinking class
My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
letting-go dream government
From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralizing resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they've become monuments to corruption.
amorphous
Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.
diet happening literature saddest
I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.
antagonism easy guess natural people power relationships
There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that.
america bombs dangerous nuclear policies
Why not have your nuclear bombs in your briefcase? All of these policies that America upholds, nuclear weapons, privatization, all of these things are going to mutate and metamorphosis into these dangerous things.
listens movement nobody peaceful people supposed
Where are these people supposed to go? This is a peaceful movement but if you're non-violent, nobody listens to you.
pity speaking writers
Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.
running risk quiet
You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
resent
I kind of resent the idea that the whole world has to be interested in the American elections.
ease festivals invested job life opposed people reviews shrink spend writer
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.
hugely per
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.