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" 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. "

Romesh Gunesekera

You

Live

Loss

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Romesh Gunesekera

Books

Think

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

Romesh Gunesekera

Story

Single

" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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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" 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

" 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. "

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