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. – Romesh Gunesekera
My writing has been shaped by the three countries – Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England – I have lived in. – Romesh Gunesekera
It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that. – Romesh Gunesekera
I don’t think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic. – Romesh Gunesekera
Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades. – Romesh Gunesekera
‘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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that’s a disguise for being a writer. – Romesh Gunesekera
Cricket fans all over the world probably have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens. – Romesh Gunesekera
With ‘Noontide Toll’, I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story. – Romesh Gunesekera
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. – Romesh Gunesekera
