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

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.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.