Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

- Author | 1954 -

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

Romesh Gunesekera

ChildGrowing UpThinkGrowingOut

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

Romesh Gunesekera

MeWritingWorldUnderstandingWay

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

Romesh Gunesekera

AnxietyYouNostalgiaOverGetMost

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

Romesh Gunesekera

TimeMeWritingUrgencyFictionAct

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

LiveTechnologyMeSafetyWorld

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

PastBetterLearnRememberForget

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

MemoryMindWritingStrategyLiving

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

TimeCityWritingYouConnection

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

ImpossibleThinkingDownWallLiving

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

StoryDoingYouBackGoNew

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

Romesh Gunesekera

RelationshipTimeLanguageOurMeans

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

Romesh Gunesekera

StrengthTimeBelieveI BelieveOver

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