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" 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. "

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

Romesh Gunesekera

Other

Because

Different

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Romesh Gunesekera

Story

Single

" Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them. "

Romesh Gunesekera

Place

Politics

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Romesh Gunesekera

Child

Growing Up

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Romesh Gunesekera

Safety

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. "

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