I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

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.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion

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.

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

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

I still do a bit of this and a bit of that. Some brews and there's nothing wrong with a bud or two!

I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn't choose acting. It chose me.

I live by the rule that you should follow your dreams…no matter what you do, you should follow your dreams

if we begin on the men, there is no stopping. We must love them when we can.

I want to be positive and say: everything I've written will get made eventually.

If you can conceive something in your mind and believe it to be true, then you can achieve it.

Well, to take me from where I was, and the life I was leading, to the life I lead now with the church and with the Lord and with Jesus Christ, it's a total, total turn-around.

You just don't know when you can find the bottom.

Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice?

I had/have a habit of sending books out before they're ready. And then I edit with almost absurd intensity. But I've done about a book a year.