Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.

To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.

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.

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

Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language while trying to make sense of our lives.

An aircraft cabin is a place that seems to be nowhere, but I find it steeped in the place left behind and the place ahead.

I could see the meal was going to be a success even before anyone had taken a single mouthful: the mood was right, and mood, I am convinced, is the most essential ingredient for any taste to develop. Taste is not a product of the mouth; it lies entirely in the mind.

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

I wrote 'The Match,' my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.

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

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.

You might want to write 'War and Peace,' but that might not be who you are. You might be better off with nursery rhymes.

We cannot forget those we love. They shape our lives for ever, by their absence as much as by their presence.

'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.

The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.

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.

My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.

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

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.

I carry more than dreams. There is so much in my head I wonder how I will ever get it out. How do I do it before it is too late? Before I forget what has happened, what I saw, what I thought, what I believed on all those journeys north and south. The hopes, the aspirations, the secret guilt embedded in our shaken lives. Before I give up on the stories that make us who we are and drift with the tide into oblivion like very other sleepy grey head in the world.

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.

I must believe that in words we will find what in fury we cannot.

I like to know about the world beyond our shores. About faraway countries where people behave differently. I like to hear about their food and customs. How they deal with the cold and the rain. What it is like to drive on the other side of the road.

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

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

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.

On this side of the wall is our house; in our backyard there is nothing. Nothing but red dust and round-headed black ants streaming and one juicy banana trunk stabbed brown--jab jab jab--never dead. I am always looking over the wall for Tissa.

Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.

So much is kept off limits these days. There are things we don't speak of, things we not only don't remember but carefully forget, places we do not stray into, memories we bury or reshape. That is the way we all live nowadays: driving a long a road between hallucination and amnesia. As long as you are moving, you are OK -- you have negotiated safe passage, for the moment. It is only when you come to a stop like this, in a black night in the middle of nowhere, that things wobble a bit and you wonder about the purpose of roads. You sit in the dark, frightened at the life you've led and things you've led undone. You can only hope that in the long run it won't matter, but that in itself is no consolation at all.

Cricket fans all over the world probably have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Artists can help re-imagine a conflict and start a dialogue.

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

Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.

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.

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.

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

I find anonymous music frees me best. Chinese pop can be perfect. I can't decipher anything on the CD label; there is nothing I can hang on to.