Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Writers imagine
About the poet
Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a pol…
View profile & all 10 Poems / StoriesMore from Arundhati Roy
the secret of the Great Stories
...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn t. And yet you want to know again.That is their mystery and their magic.
Never To Forget
<To love.To be loved.
And the air was full of Thoughts
..And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.
She wore flowers in her hair
...She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.
This was the trouble with families
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
