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

— Arundhati Roy

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons, I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

— Arundhati Roy

Flat muscled and honey colored. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.

— Arundhati Roy

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.

— Arundhati Roy

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

— Arundhati Roy

Glanced up and caught Ammo's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars its wound from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain as water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no-one noticed. In that brief moment, Delta looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history's blinkers.... This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment. Ammo saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

— Arundhati Roy

Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.

— Arundhati Roy

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?

— Arundhati Roy

Heaven opened, and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenwashing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

— Arundhati Roy

He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.

— Arundhati Roy