When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

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.

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

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.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.