Arundhati Roy

“Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.”

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.”

“Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.”

“Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.”

“Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”

“The system will not reform itself.”

“Once you have an audience, you have a responsibility.”

“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.”

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories.”

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”

“Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.”

“The great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again.”

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.”

“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.”