Romesh Gunesekera Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von 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.

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

I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else's, too.

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

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

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

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 there ever will be a biopic on me! I would much like some of my books to be made into films.

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 I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romesh Gunesekera

I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romesh Gunesekera