Thread by @edbookfest

Here’s Arundhati Roy with chair @NicolaSturgeon at #EdBookFest

The night I won the Booker, I had a dream that I was a fish. A green hand came and picked me up and said, you are a very special fish. And I said, put me back! It was disconcerting... ~Arundhati Roy

When the sudden sharp turn to the right began, I had to declare my position that I am not on this bus. That led to a big backlash. ~Arundhati Roy

To have money in India at this time and to be a political thinker— what does it mean to be famous and have money in a world you are suspicious of? ~Arundhati Roy

What does a writer crave in the world? A writer craves a depth of understanding. ~Arundhati Roy

The real royalty was that I woud be invited into insurrections, into the secret space where other people would not be trusted. This was the most fulfilling thing that any writer could want. ~Arundhati Roy

In the past twenty years, India was changing at some rate. There was a sense of urgency, intervening when spaces are closing down... I had the space to break the consensus from time to time. I could say— there is another way of looking at this. ~Arundhati Roy

There is a part of me that is always in search of language, a language in which to explain the way I think. That language, yes, in a way is English, but it is enriched by a culture that is enriched and deepened by several languages ~Arundhati Roy

Every few years a pattern repeats itself in my life. That is five male lawyers get together and file a case against me. ~Arundhati Roy

I used to call myself, “the hooker who won the Booker”... they said I want behaving like a reasonable man ~Arundhati Roy on being called ‘that woman’ while being pestered by lawyers.

What is not political? I think in India the intellectual upper caste, including the left, have a managed to produce so much work so they don’t address the issue of caste. ~Arundhati Roy

What is it you are trying not to see? What is that is making you uncomfortable so that you can categorise the world in this way? ~Arundhati Roy

There is no excuse for bad art. Even if it is against dams or politically correct— please spare us the mediocre stuff. ~Arundhati Roy

You shouldn’t ever write a novel that you can summarise. ~Arundhati Roy

My Seditious Heart might be a city, rather than a novel. You have to live in it, get lost in it, smoke a cigarette in it. ~Arundhati Roy

As a student of urban planning, when I write a novel the structure is everything. The idea of a city is you try to design it and it undesigns itself. You let it go, and you gather it, you let it go, and you gather it. ~Arundhati Roy

Kashmir is a great tragedy. The Indian government has locked it down... It is unbelievable what has been done in the past two weeks. ~Arundhati Roy

India is a society that lives in a hierarchical grid of caste. Of ancestral divisions. Of ethnic divisions. And these are hard. Someone when you’re off the grid, you someone encounter everyone else who is off the grid. ~Arundhati Roy

Who are the people in the book? People who have borders running through them. Borders of gender, of religion, of caste, borders between life and death... I am a person that has many kinds of borders running through me. ~Arundhati Roy

My understanding of things seems to be a radar for how language suddenly changes... The nuclear tests in the 90s changed the public language in India. It became a language of aggression, of annihilation, of nationalism... I could see it coming... ~Arundhati Roy

People think the violence between Muslims and Hindus came from 1947. But in fact partition is a flawed word. It makes it seem like there was a whole that was portioned. The violence came from the assimilation of the states, and one of these was Jammu and Kashmir. ~Arundhati Roy

There are a lot of people standing up and they are all in danger— writers, journalists. If Kashmir is occupied by an army, India is occupied by a mob, not The Mob, but a mob. There is something so enraging about it that you just feel like standing tour ground. ~Arundhati Roy

We will at least put down the story. Even if we lose, we are not going anywhere. And we don’t want to be on your side. ~Arundhati Roy

As a writer, fiction is what I love and fiction is what I do. I am never in hurry and that’s what I love about fiction ~Arundhati Roy

People are more and more connected and yet the information is more and more curated... Everyone being connected makes it so vast that you can feel helpless. It is important to be connected down into the ground ~Arundhati Roy

Can anybody help in India? I doubt it. Ultimately the story of fascism is that it dies. What is the price we will pay as it plays itself out? Opposition parties have more or less dissolved. It’s up to the people to find a way out. But it’s also the people who are frightening ~Roy

Literature is my way of maintaining equilibrium, of trying to deepen my understanding of the world, gaining a perspective and empathy that is so important... I have a theory if more political leaders read literature, the world wouldn’t be in the state it is in ~Nicola Sturgeon

Rapturous applause for Arundhati Roy as she ends her #EdBookFest event with Nicola Sturgeon