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Romesh Gunesekera Quotes
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Born: 1954
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
Politics
War
Place
Go
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Journey
Road
Hands
Book
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Poetry
Place
Special
Island
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
History
Architecture
Strange
Office
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Live
Find
Want
Through
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
World
Reading
Growing Up
Place
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Future
Face
Past
Live
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Thinking
Impossible
Way
Down
At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.
Romesh Gunesekera
Naughty
Reading
Anything
Started
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Education
Mistake
Political
Playing
Top 10
Romesh Gunesekera
Quotes
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Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.
Romesh Gunesekera
Me
World
Way
Important
Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.
Romesh Gunesekera
You
Anxiety
Nostalgia
Sense
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
Time
You
Past
Live
For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.
Romesh Gunesekera
Me
Time
Writing
Act
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
Technology
Me
World
Remember
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Past
Remember
Forget
Better
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Mind
Memory
Remember
Writing
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Time
You
City
Writing
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Future
You
Power
Past
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
You
Way
New
Doing
Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.
Romesh Gunesekera
Relationship
Time
Language
Which
I believe if a sentence is to retain its strength over time, it needs to be carefully made.
Romesh Gunesekera
Strength
Time
Believe
I Believe
People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.
Romesh Gunesekera
People
World
Who
Different
I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.
Romesh Gunesekera
Think
Tried
Become
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Me
Think
Will
Some
With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.
Romesh Gunesekera
Story
Single
More
Than
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