Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he’s in love with ghosts.
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn’t capsized.
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Half a page – and the morning is already ancient.
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.