Top 79 Aravind Adiga Quotes
#1. He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glourious parliamentary democracy
Aravind Adiga
#2. Chain of envy linked them, showing each what was lacking in life, but offering also the consolation that happiness was present right next door, in the life of a neighbour, an element of the same society.
Aravind Adiga
#3. The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. Instead of which, they're all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements.
Aravind Adiga
#4. You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.
Aravind Adiga
#5. It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.
Aravind Adiga
#6. It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.
Aravind Adiga
#7. Because in this world, there is a line: on one side are the men who cannot get things done, and on the other side are the men who can. And not one in a hundred will cross that line. Will you?
Aravind Adiga
#8. Every time there's elections, we hand out cash. Usually to both sides, but this time the government is going to win for sure. The opposition is in a total mess. So we just have to pay off the government, which is good for us.
Aravind Adiga
#9. See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.
Aravind Adiga
#10. An honest politician has no goodies to toss around. This limits his effectiveness profoundly, because political power in India is dispersed throughout a multi-tiered federal structure; a local official who has not been paid off can sometimes stop a billion-dollar project.
Aravind Adiga
#11. The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.
Aravind Adiga
#12. I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
Aravind Adiga
#13. Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.
Aravind Adiga
#15. You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.
Aravind Adiga
#16. If only a man could spit his past out so easily.
Aravind Adiga
#17. If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like.
Aravind Adiga
#18. Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books
Aravind Adiga
#19. I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.
Aravind Adiga
#20. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.
Aravind Adiga
#21. In India, it's the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs.
Aravind Adiga
#22. When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter.
Aravind Adiga
#23. The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money.
Aravind Adiga
#24. You were looking for the key for years, but the door was always open.
Aravind Adiga
#25. I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.
Aravind Adiga
#26. I am not an original thinker - but I am an original listener.)
Aravind Adiga
#27. It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning re-election to their golden thrones in heaven year after year.
Aravind Adiga
#28. And then he realized that the thing that was blocking his passage was cleared, and he was falling; his body had begun its short earthly flight - which it completed almost instantaneously - before Yogesh Murthy's soul was released for its much longer flight over the oceans of the other world.
Aravind Adiga
#29. Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao,
that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with
a conscience?
Aravind Adiga
#30. They remain slaves because they can't see what is beautiful in this world.
Aravind Adiga
#31. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.
Aravind Adiga
#32. When it comes to work - hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment - delay, delay, delay. Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.
Aravind Adiga
#33. Even here, in the weight machine of a train station, they try to hoodwink us. Here, on the threshold of a man's freedom, just before he boards a train to a new life, these flashing fortune machines are the final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop.
Aravind Adiga
#34. Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.
Aravind Adiga
#35. Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder ... '
The point of living? My heart pounded The point of your living is that if you die, who's going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month?
Aravind Adiga
#36. My whole life have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one of mine - at least one - should live like a man.
Aravind Adiga
#37. Like most people who live in India, I complain about corruption, but know that I can live with corrupt men. It is the honest ones I secretly worry about.
Aravind Adiga
#38. Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.
Aravind Adiga
#39. Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?
Aravind Adiga
#40. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave
Aravind Adiga
#41. What good is winning a battle, if you don't even realise there's a war going on?
Aravind Adiga
#42. What keeps India safe really is the heroism of millions of poor Indians who every day reject the allure of terrorism. What keeps India safe is just the courage of poor Indians, not the actions of its government.
Aravind Adiga
#43. The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.
Aravind Adiga
#44. Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.
Aravind Adiga
#45. Vishram is a building like the people living in it, middle class to its core. Improvement or failure, it is incapable of either extremity.
Aravind Adiga
#46. But isn't it likely that everyone in this world ... has killed someone or other on their way to the top? ... All I wanted was a chance to be a man
and for that, one murder is enough.
Aravind Adiga
#47. Any good society survives on a circulation of favours.
Aravind Adiga
#48. Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.
Aravind Adiga
#49. An Indian Revolution?
No Sir. It won't happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom from somewhere else - from jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen.
Aravind Adiga
#50. Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers.
Aravind Adiga
#51. When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.
Aravind Adiga
#52. In a sense, being a full-time writer is less fun because there's no office to go to anymore, there's no set routine, there's no schedule. It can be quite isolating.
Aravind Adiga
#53. India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.
Aravind Adiga
#54. Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free
Aravind Adiga
#56. Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
Aravind Adiga
#57. Have you ever noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It's a puzzle, isn't it? If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail.
Aravind Adiga
#58. Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.
Aravind Adiga
#59. We'll call you ... Ram. Wait - don't we have a Ram in this class? I don't want any confusion, it'll be Balram. You know who Balram was, don't you?"
"No, sir."
"He was the sidekick of the god Krishna. Know what my name is?"
"No, sir."
"He laughed. "Krishna.
Aravind Adiga
#60. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain.
The difference is everything.
Aravind Adiga
#62. I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city.
Aravind Adiga
#63. I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.
Aravind Adiga
#64. In terms of formal education, I may somewhat lacking. I never finished school. I am a self-taught entrepreneur, that's the best kind there is, trust me
Aravind Adiga
#65. The future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse
Aravind Adiga
#66. Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.
Aravind Adiga
#67. At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society.
Aravind Adiga
#68. Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
Aravind Adiga
#69. I was never born and I will never die; I do not hurt and cannot be hurt; I am invincible, immortal, indestructible.
Aravind Adiga
#70. We may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.
Aravind Adiga
#71. In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.
Aravind Adiga
#73. In a socialistic economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper.
Aravind Adiga
#75. A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.
Aravind Adiga
#76. Revenge is the capitalism of the poor: conserve the original wound, defer immediate gratification, fatten the first insult with new insults, invest and reinvest spite, and ke waiting for the perfect moment to strike back.
Aravind Adiga
#77. A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous.
Aravind Adiga
#78. Sardonic, seriocomic saga of the plight of India's poor.
Aravind Adiga
#79. Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.
Aravind Adiga
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