Top 35 Vikas Swarup Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes street knowledge can be as important as book knowledge.”

— Vikas Swarup

2. “Love doesn’t happen in an instant. It creeps up on you and then it turns your life upside down. It colors your waking moments, and fills your dreams. You begin to walk on air and see life in brilliant new shades. But it also brings with it a sweet agony, a delicious torture.”

— Vikas Swarup

3. “Tokyo may have more money and Kyoto more culture; Nara may have more history and Kobe more style. But Osaka has the biggest heart.”

— Vikas Swarup

4. “The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life.”

— Vikas Swarup

5. “And I realized again that real life is different from reel life.”

— Vikas Swarup

6. “Never judge a man’s actions until you know his motives.”

— Vikas Swarup

7. “Global terror does not respect national boundaries.”

— Vikas Swarup

8. “Mumbai may not be my city. But it is my kind of city.”

— Vikas Swarup

9. “I wonder what it feels like to have no desires left because you have satisfied them all, smothered them with money even before they are born. Is an existence without desire very desirable? And is the poverty of desire better than rank poverty itself?”

— Vikas Swarup

10. “I am neither a Bengali nor am I from Delhi’s St Stephen’s. I am an Allahabad boy.”

— Vikas Swarup

11. “That dreams have power only over your own mind. But with money you can have power over the minds of others.”

— Vikas Swarup

12. “Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.”

— Vikas Swarup

13. “God made the human body like a machine with built-in obsolescence.”

— Vikas Swarup

14. “One does not question a miracle.”

— Vikas Swarup

15. “The brain is not an organ we are authorized to use. We are supposed to use only our hands and legs.”

— Vikas Swarup

16. “Just because someone has gone to an elite school and college does not make him smarter than the person who has grown up on street knowledge.”

— Vikas Swarup

17. “I am very interested in human-interest stories emerging from modern India. I get my inspiration and daily dose by reading the Hindustan Times.”

— Vikas Swarup

18. “I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.”

— Vikas Swarup

19. “I want to show that the underdog can win. I believe were all the same: you, a slum girl, my mother.”

— Vikas Swarup

20. “I became completely addicted to ‘Angry Birds’ for a while.”

— Vikas Swarup

21. “I am not into the unrealistic realm of magic realism where birds talk.”

— Vikas Swarup

22. “The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard.”

— Vikas Swarup

23. “My books may highlight corruption, brutality and venality, but they also show that if these things come to light, there is rectification. The voiceless do have a voice; democratic mechanisms and accountability do exist.”

— Vikas Swarup

24. “The first thing you have to understand is that I was not desperate to be a writer. I was never a closet writer filing away notes in a cupboard.”

— Vikas Swarup

25. “My books are about ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations who are able to draw upon their inner reserves to challenge the status-quo in life and navigate compelling human relationships.”

— Vikas Swarup

26. “A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.”

— Vikas Swarup

27. “People don’t just want a mindless flick with a superstar; they want to connect more deeply.”

— Vikas Swarup

28. “I need to meet people to be able to write.”

— Vikas Swarup

29. “My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.”

— Vikas Swarup

30. “The writer’s is an interior world, a world of the mind.”

— Vikas Swarup

31. “I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn’t awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn’t disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.”

— Vikas Swarup

32. “It is a destiny of a woman to suffer in silence.”

— Vikas Swarup

33. “There are those who will say that I brought this upon myself. By dabbling in that quiz show. They will wag a finger at me and remind me of what the elders in Dharavi say about never crossing the dividing line that separates the rich from the poor. After all, what business did a penniless waiter have to be participating in a brain quiz? The brain is not an organ we are authorized to use. We are supposed to use only our hands and legs.”

— Vikas Swarup

34. “The line of head is strong, but the line of heart is weak. And most importantly, the line of life is short. The stars do not seem to be right.”

— Vikas Swarup

35. “I get invited to many more literary festivals than I used to because I’m associated with ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ the brand. Many more doors have opened up for me as a result of the global success of the film, although I believe that I’m the same person that existed before it.”

— Vikas Swarup

36. “I held my breath and wished for that moment to last as long as it possibly could, because a waking dream is always more fleeting than a sleeping one.”

— Vikas Swarup

37. “There is some pleasure even in pain. A sweet ecstasy.”

— Vikas Swarup

38. “Politics without Principle, Wealth without Work, Knowledge without Character, Commerce without Morality, Science without Humanity, Worship without Sacrifice and Pleasure without Conscience.”

— Vikas Swarup

39. “Till now, my conception of love has been based entirely on what I have seen in Hindi films, where the hero and the heroine make eye contact, and whoosh, some strange chemistry sets their hearts beating and their vocal chords tingling, and the next you see of them they are off singing songs in Swiss Villages and American shopping malls.”

— Vikas Swarup