Arundhati Roy

"There is no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard."

"I am angry almost all the time."

"The only thing worth globalizing is dissent."

"Not all love is heroic. Some of it is quite ordinary."

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you."

"Come. Sit. Drink some tea. Let's talk about writing, about life, about the Book of Laws."

"The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out."

"Small things can be weathered, and absorbed, but to change the course of the world, to reshape the world, demands that you believe something in your heart."

"Remember you are a Harappan. Even if you forget, the river won't."

"The moment you fall in love, it is a private thing."

"Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it is actually the other way around."

"Art is a kind of revolutionary patience."

"The only dream worth having, I think, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die after you're dead."

"Every empire, however far it extends, carries the seeds of its own dissolution."

"I've discovered that I'm incredibly lazy when it comes to my own writing."

"Beauty doesn't need ornament. Simplicity is the best adornment. So remove everything unnecessary to reveal the meaning of true beauty."

"The trouble with the novel is that it's a form that was much better suited to the 19th century, when people had the time to read novels."

"In Kashmir, the nature of what is happening is not immediately apparent."

"A book, like a person, has a shelf life."

"Once you've seen certain things, you can't unsee them, and I think once you've seen the need in the world, the suffering in the world, you can't just walk away from it."

"Morality is a luxury for the wealthy."

"The only thing worth globalizing is dissent. Peace, after all, is hardest achieved by those who are most able to wage war."

"If you're writing a novel today, you're writing against the grain of the time."

"Your man is in civil society. And civil society is a very complex place."

"The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-human, thing that man has ever made."

"We shall overcome if we don't give up."

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who has said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."

"Freedom is not a frivolous thing."

"The world is run by monsters and those monsters are in you."

"I think it's a sign of how much this country is deteriorating, that you can't even have a civilized conversation."