Romesh Gunesekera

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.

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.

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

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.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

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.

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

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.

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

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.

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.