Fiction Quotes by Arundhati Roy

17 Fiction quotes by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy’s reflections on fiction intertwine poetic sensibility with social consciousness. In seventeen succinct passages she illustrates how storytelling can amplify marginalized voices and stir collective responsibility.

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“Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.”

Arundhati Roy

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As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

Arundhati Roy

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“Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...”

Arundhati Roy

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Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

Arundhati Roy

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Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.

Arundhati Roy

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“Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.”

Arundhati Roy

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I need fiction like you need to eat or exercise.

Arundhati Roy

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There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already…

Arundhati Roy

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“Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck…

Arundhati Roy

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There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

Arundhati Roy

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To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For…

Arundhati Roy

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Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me.…

Arundhati Roy

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Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should…

Arundhati Roy

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Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The…

Arundhati Roy

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It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining…

Arundhati Roy

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“Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a…

Arundhati Roy

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Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually…

Arundhati Roy

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Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists

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

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NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they…

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I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was…

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It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

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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.

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The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

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But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there…

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Truly, there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really…

Arundhati Roy

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