64 Quotes by Romesh Gunesekera

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

'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.

Cricket fans all over the world probably have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens.

I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.

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.

The old idea that you grow wiser as you get older, and you learn from your elders, is actually completely wrong.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

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.