Quotes from Romesh Gunesekera

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

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

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

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.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

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.

I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else's, too.

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

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 like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.

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.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

'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.

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.

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.

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'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.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

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.

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

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.