Words matter. These are the best Romesh Gunesekera Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.
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.
Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.
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.
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.
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.
At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.
I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.
You might want to write ‘War and Peace,’ but that might not be who you are. You might be better off with nursery rhymes.
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 grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.
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.
Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.
I wrote ‘The Match,’ my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.
An aircraft cabin is a place that seems to be nowhere, but I find it steeped in the place left behind and the place ahead.
People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.
With ‘Noontide Toll’, I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.
Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.
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.
My parents knew a wider range of people than most, and so we had actors, journalists, politicians, planters, sportsmen and women and business folk all coming in and out of the places we lived in. Although my parents were not wealthy, they lived a legendary and amazingly cosmopolitan life.
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.
When I was growing up, I don’t think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.
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.
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.
I find anonymous music frees me best. Chinese pop can be perfect. I can’t decipher anything on the CD label; there is nothing I can hang on to.
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.
We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.
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.
As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that’s a disguise for being a writer.
In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.
