Romesh Gunesekera

Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language while trying to make sense of our lives.

I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else's, too.

The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.

I must believe that in words we will find what in fury we cannot.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

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.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

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 like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

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

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.

We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.

I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.

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.

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

I don't think there ever will be a biopic on me! I would much like some of my books to be made into films.