The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion

In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

When I began to write novels, I wanted to keep that element of interaction with the reader that exists in poetry, not just for the reader to be shepherded from A to B to C to D but to participate, and the less you say sometimes, the better it is. You know, it's the way when someone speaks very quietly, you move forward so you can listen more carefully.

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.

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.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.