In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

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.

Nothing can be truer than fairy wisdom. It is as true as sunbeams.

Every name in a TV show has to be run by the legal department first.

[I]n framing a Government for a nation we ought, in those provisions which are designed to be permanent, to calculate not on temporary, but on permanent causes of expence.

Be tenacious. Get as much stage time as possible.

Tell me what's going on here. Why can I hear your voice inside my head and why did you say you came to school for me?" "I was tired of admiring your legs from a distance.

I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

If it doesn't make sense, you must find for the defense.

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.