You’re getting everyone’s point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
When you’re writing, it’s as if you’re within a kind of closed world.
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.
Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.
Nowadays he doesn’t think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.
All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.
I see myself as someone who’s been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.
There’s always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
That’s Anil’s path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.