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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.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
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Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
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More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.
Arundhati Roy
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The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
Arundhati Roy
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History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.
Arundhati Roy
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The writer is the midwife of understanding.
Arundhati Roy
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Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice.
Arundhati Roy
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Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists
Arundhati Roy
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India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition.
Arundhati Roy
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It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market.
Arundhati Roy
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I don't have the Big Idea. I don't have the arrogance to even want to have the Big Idea. But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That's what keeps the balance in the universe... the refusal to obey.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against corruption and for transparency. They want the Rule of Law - as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment.
Arundhati Roy
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If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. Does what count? The happiness does it count?. She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts.....If you eat fish in a dream, does it count? Does it mean you've eaten fish?
Arundhati Roy
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States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.
Arundhati Roy
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Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
Arundhati Roy
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To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.
Arundhati Roy