Top 80 Aravind Adiga Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.”

— Aravind Adiga

2. “I was looking for the key for years But the door was always open.”

— Aravind Adiga

3. “The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.”

— Aravind Adiga

4. “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

5. “Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.”

— Aravind Adiga

6. “Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.”

— Aravind Adiga

7. “Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.”

— Aravind Adiga

8. “Every book is a kind of struggle, and it’s a miracle when it comes out.”

— Aravind Adiga

9. “A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.”

— Aravind Adiga

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

— Aravind Adiga

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

11. “They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.”

— Aravind Adiga

12. “Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.”

— Aravind Adiga

13. “Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love – or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?”

— Aravind Adiga

14. “Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.”

— Aravind Adiga

15. “It’s amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.”

— Aravind Adiga

16. “You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.”

— Aravind Adiga

17. “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

18. “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

19. “I was never born and I will never die; I do not hurt and cannot be hurt; I am invincible, immortal, indestructible.”

— Aravind Adiga

20. “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

21. “When he caught his breath, he said, “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine – at least one – should live like a man.” What it meant to live like a man was a mystery. I thought it meant being like Vijay, the bus conductor. The.”

— Aravind Adiga

22. “Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.”

— Aravind Adiga

23. “If only a man could spit his past out so easily.”

— Aravind Adiga

24. “Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.”

— Aravind Adiga

25. “Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.”

— Aravind Adiga

26. “The more I stole from him, the more I realized how much he had stolen from me.”

— Aravind Adiga

27. “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

28. “The coop is guarded from the inside.”

— Aravind Adiga

29. “India’s great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.”

— Aravind Adiga

30. “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

31. “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

32. “If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!”

— Aravind Adiga

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “A man’s past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.”

— Aravind Adiga

37. “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

38. “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... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.”

— Aravind Adiga

39. “Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent – as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”

— Aravind Adiga

40. “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

41. “Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erst-while master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore. By telling you my life’s story.”

— Aravind Adiga

42. “I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city.”

— Aravind Adiga

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

46. “I’ve lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.”

— Aravind Adiga

47. “To sum up – in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up.”

— Aravind Adiga

48. “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

49. “Any good society survives on a circulation of favours.”

— Aravind Adiga

50. “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