Romesh Gunesekera Quotes - BrainyQuote

- Author 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

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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