Romesh Gunesekera

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.”

“My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 don't think there ever will be a biopic on me! I would much like some of my books to be made into films.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.”

“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.”

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

“Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.”