Aravind Adiga Quotes

Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga is an Indian writer and journalist. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. (Aravind Adiga Quotes)

“A man’s past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.”
Aravind Adiga
Last Man in Tower

“A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and Knicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“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
Last Man in Tower

“Any good society survives on a circulation of favours.”
Aravind Adiga
Last Man in Tower

“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
Last Man in Tower

“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
The White Tiger

“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 neighbor, an element of the same society.”
Aravind Adiga
Last Man in Tower

“Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love – or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what.”
Aravind Adiga
Amnesty

“Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“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 glorious parliamentary democracy.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“I absorbed everything – that’s the amazing thing about entrepreneurs. We are like sponges – we absorb and grow.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“I am a self-taught entrepreneur. That’s the best kind there is, trust me.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“I was looking for the key for years But the door was always open.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“In a socialistic economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper.”
Aravind Adiga
Last Man in Tower

“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
The White Tiger

“Incidentally, sir, while we’re on the topic of yoga – may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur’s day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea. Make yoga a must in all Chinese schools – that’s my suggestion.” (Aravind Adiga Quotes)
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.”
Aravind Adiga
Last Man in Tower

“Indians just take to technology like ducks to water.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“It’s amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“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
The White Tiger

“Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life – possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“My humble prediction: in twenty years’ time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“No servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are. Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love – or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free”
Aravind Adiga
Last Man in Tower

“Now he explained to her the essential fraudulence of all sporting glory. “Average twenty-one-year-old male, given basic training for one month, can run a hundred meters in about fourteen seconds. Okay? Fastest man runs same distance in nine point nine seconds. Not much of a difference. One to one point four is the range. Now, what is the difference between an average man’s intelligence and Einstein’s? Cannot measure it.”
Aravind Adiga
Amnesty

“One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia. These are the only three nations I admire.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“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 waiting for the perfect moment to strike back.”
Aravind Adiga
Selection Day

“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
The White Tiger

“So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans. “Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“That’s the one good thing I’ll say for myself. I’ve always been a big believer in education – especially my own.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“The dreams of the rich and the dreams of the poor – they never overlap, do they? 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
The White Tiger

“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 Quotes)
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“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
The White Tiger

“The history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“The main thing to know about Delhi is that the roads are good, and the people are bad. The police are totally rotten.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“The only mind in the whole world he could not read was Javed’s: for what we discover, when we think we are discovering someone else’s thoughts, is our own diminished expectations of them. And the one person Manju could not create a diminished version of was this beak-nosed boy.”
Aravind Adiga
Selection Day

“The road is a jungle, get it? A good driver must roar to get ahead on it.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“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
The White Tiger

“The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“Turning to his right, Danny saw a great fig tree sparkle in many places inside its dark canopy of leaves, like a thing that knew its own heart.”
Aravind Adiga
Amnesty

“Urdu, the language of the Muslims – which is all just scratches and dots, as if some crow dipped its feet in black ink and pressed them to the page.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour’s children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country.”
Aravind Adiga
Selection Day

“We may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“What we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind.”
Aravind Adiga
Selection Day

“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
Last Man in Tower

“White people use cell phones too much, and that is destroying their brains. It’s a known fact. Cell phones cause cancer in the brain and shrink your masculinity; the Japanese invented them to diminish the white man’s brain and balls at the same time.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“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
The White Tiger

“You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

“You’ll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us. Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop.”
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger