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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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

– Romesh Gunesekera

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

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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

– Romesh Gunesekera

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

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

My parents knew a wider range of people than most, and so we had actors, journalists, politicians, planters, sportsmen and women and business folk all coming in and out of the places we lived in. Although my parents were not wealthy, they lived a legendary and amazingly cosmopolitan life.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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

– Romesh Gunesekera

I must believe that in words we will find what in fury we cannot.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.

– Romesh Gunesekera

I wrote ‘The Match,’ my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.

– Romesh Gunesekera

You might want to write ‘War and Peace,’ but that might not be who you are. You might be better off with nursery rhymes.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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

– Romesh Gunesekera

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

– Romesh Gunesekera

I believe if a sentence is to retain its strength over time, it needs to be carefully made.

– Romesh Gunesekera

Sure, cricket on a beach on the isle of Jura is different from a Test match in a stadium in Galle, 6000 miles away, despite the sea air.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– 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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– 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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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

– Romesh Gunesekera

If you are writing something, you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject, and at the same time, you have to have a connection.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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.

– Romesh Gunesekera

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