How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.

For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.

Politically I don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country.

She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome-the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

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.