Top 100 Aravind Adiga Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.”

— Aravind Adiga

57. “I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.”

— Aravind Adiga

58. “I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again – from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this – that was the only way he could tolerate this cage.”

— Aravind Adiga

59. “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

60. “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

61. “That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.”

— Aravind Adiga

62. “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

63. “Here’s a strange fact: 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

64. “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

65. “Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans.”

— Aravind Adiga

66. “And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras – this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here.”

— Aravind Adiga

67. “I was eager to try coffee. You see, poor people in the north of this country drink tea, and poor people in the south drink coffee. Who decided that things should be like this, I don’t know, but it’s like this. – Balram Halwai.”

— Aravind Adiga

68. “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. – Balram Halwai.”

— Aravind Adiga

69. “When I was a boy in Laxmangarh, and I used to play with my father’s body, the junction of the neck and the chest, the place where all the tendons and veins stick out in high relief, was my favorite spot. When I touched this spot, the pit of my father’s neck, I controlled him – I could make him stop breathing with the pressure of a finger.”

— Aravind Adiga

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “Yes, it’s true: a few hundred thousand rupees of someone else’s money, and a lot of hard work, can make magic happen in this country.”

— Aravind Adiga

74. “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

75. “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

76. “What I am describing to you here is what happens to drivers in Delhi every day, sir. You don’t believe me – you think I’m making all this up, Mr. Jiabao?”

— Aravind Adiga

77. “You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse.”

— Aravind Adiga

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— Aravind Adiga

79. “What good is winning a battle, if you don’t even realise there’s a war going on?”

— Aravind Adiga

80. “Because Indians are the world’s most honest people, like the prime minister’s booklet will inform you? No. It’s because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.”

— Aravind Adiga

81. “You know who this fellow in the poster looks like?” “Who?” I asked. He grinned. “Me.” I looked at his face, and I looked at the photo. “It’s true,” I said, slapping him on the back. I told you: it could be the face of half the men in India.”

— Aravind Adiga

82. “I knew I was in the right city. But my father, if he were alive, would be sitting on that pavement, cooking some rice gruel for dinner, and getting ready to lie down and sleep under a streetlamp, and I couldn’t stop thinking of that and recognizing his features in some beggar out there. So I was in some way out of the car too, even while I was driving it.”

— Aravind Adiga

83. “Dietro una maschera di amore noi odiamo i nostri padroni. O forse, dietro una maschera di odio, li amiamo.”

— Aravind Adiga

84. “Don’t worry about it, Asif,” I said. The boy looked so devastated. I’ve come to respect Muslims, sir. They’re not the brightest lot, except for those four poet fellows, but they make good drivers, and they’re honest people, by and large, although a few of them seem to get this urge to blow trains up every year. I wasn’t going to fire Asif over this. But I did ask him to find out the address of the boy, the one we had killed.”

— Aravind Adiga

85. “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

86. “The answer to the second question is that only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed – hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters – can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature. It would, in fact, take a White Tiger. You are listening to the story of a social entrepreneur, sir.”

— Aravind Adiga

87. “There was a good reason for the face masks; they say the air is so bad in Delhi that it takes ten years out of a man’s life.”

— Aravind Adiga

88. “Balram is what you’d hear if one day the drains and faucets in your house started talking.”

— Aravind Adiga

89. “Free people don’t know the value of freedom.”

— Aravind Adiga

90. “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

91. “Good, Country-Mouse. It’s all here. And where is your master? Will you drive him there?” “I am my own master.”

— Aravind Adiga

92. “White men will be finished within my lifetime. There are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they’re up to – the radio never talks about them. 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

93. “Mr. Ashok was a classic first-gear man. He liked to start things, but nothing held his attention for long.”

— Aravind Adiga

94. “Eight months later, I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat.”

— Aravind Adiga

95. “Come tutte le migliori store di Bangalore, anche la mia ha inizio molto lontano da Bangalore. Vede, adesso sono nella Luce, ma sono nato e cresciuto nelle Tenebre.”

— Aravind Adiga

96. “Here we have one. No wonder we keep getting jams. Nothing is planned. How will we ever catch up with the Chinese?”

— Aravind Adiga

97. “Being called a murderer: fine, I have no objection to that. It’s a fact: I am a sinner, a fallen human. But to be called a murderer by the police!”

— Aravind Adiga

98. “Oh, she was one of those people.” “Who live under the flyovers and bridges, sir. That’s my guess too.”

— Aravind Adiga

99. “Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life – possessive, even.”

— Aravind Adiga

100. “Haven’t I succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making – the struggle not to take the lashes your father took.”

— Aravind Adiga