Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

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The nationalist movement supported Sinhala by suppressing Tamil; there were competing nationalisms. It was a fundamental mistake to make parallel streams in education - or a calculated political gamble. Politicians were playing with it.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.

Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.

To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.

If you are writing something, you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject, and at the same time, you have to have a connection.

Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.

Whether we live in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India, the U.K. or the U.S., we face similar issues of understanding, remembering the past that has made us and seeing the future we want.

Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.

I believe if a sentence is to retain its strength over time, it needs to be carefully made.

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.

Sri Lanka is a part of my background: it's not where I live, but it's what I want to explore. And I find it works very well to explore through fiction.

I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.

I don't think there ever will be a biopic on me! I would much like some of my books to be made into films.

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.

I was very lucky - it wasn't a question of being wealthy; my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel.

I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.

We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.

At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

The old idea that you grow wiser as you get older, and you learn from your elders, is actually completely wrong.

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