64 Quotes by Romesh Gunesekera

I was very lucky - it wasn't a question of being wealthy; my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel.

We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.

Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.