When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

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

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?