Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Sri Lankan Authors - Page 2

Sure, cricket on a beach on the isle of Jura is different from a Test match in a stadium in Galle, 6000 miles away, despite the sea air.

The old idea that you grow wiser as you get older, and you learn from your elders, is actually completely wrong.

If you are writing something, you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject, and at the same time, you have to have a connection.

Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.

Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.

I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

I was very lucky - it wasn't a question of being wealthy; my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel.

When we first moved to Scarborough, there was one Sri Lankan grocery store - now there's a take-out on every corner, each with some specialty or another. You can get what you want the way you want it, and that's very different from the way it used to be.

My parents knew a wider range of people than most, and so we had actors, journalists, politicians, planters, sportsmen and women and business folk all coming in and out of the places we lived in. Although my parents were not wealthy, they lived a legendary and amazingly cosmopolitan life.

Cricket fans all over the world probably have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

The purpose of meditation is personal transformation.

Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.