Arundhati Roy

I am very conscious that, from the time of 'The God of Small Things' was published 10 years ago, we are in a different world... which needs to be written about differently, and I really very much want to do that. ”

I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought. ”

I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily. ”

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. ”

I have truly known what it means for a writer to feel loved. ”

Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again? ”

Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway. ”

There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that. ”

I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much; you may love a building, but I don't think that you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth; it's a different kind of love. ”

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power. ”