64 Quotes by Romesh Gunesekera

We cannot forget those we love. They shape our lives for ever, by their absence as much as by their presence.

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

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.

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

My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.

Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language while trying to make sense of our lives.

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.

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

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.