Some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.

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.

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.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.