Top 54 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.