It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

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.

It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to.

All life goes in a circle, around and around, you started at one place, and then came right back to it again.

Had it been in the Old Testament Harry Potter would have been put to death.

During the songs, you transcend yourself. The best way to be in the performance is to be without pause and be essentially in the moment, in that moment of expression.

You're getting old when you see a girl who looks like someone you used to know, and it turns out to be her daughter.

The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors.

No. . .I mean, I'm sorry he. . .You know, said those things to you." "It's part of being a 'good' family. Everyone's got skeletons in their closet.

Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.