Romesh Gunesekera Quotes - BrainyQuote

- Author Born: 1954

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 Island Special

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 Want Find Explore

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 Book Hands

Sure, cricket on a beach on the isle of Jura is different from a Test match in a stadium in Galle, 6000 miles away, despite the sea air.

Romesh Gunesekera

Sea Beach Cricket Air

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

Romesh Gunesekera

Think Child Growing Up Up

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 Place Growing Up

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

War Politics Small Place

At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.

Romesh Gunesekera

Naughty Reading Anything Started

Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.

Romesh Gunesekera

Life King Words Changes

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 Down Impossible Situation

Top 10
Romesh Gunesekera
Quotes

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

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

Romesh Gunesekera

Me World Understanding 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 Over

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 Loss

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 Against

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

Me Technology 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 Better Remember Forget

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

Memory Mind 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 Your

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 Doing Back

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 India Face Past

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

Romesh Gunesekera

Relationship Time Language Our

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 Because

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 Become Tried Write

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