What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.

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.

Being compassionate can be an exciting exercise of embracing life if you let it be.

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

Tis the old wind in the old anger, But then it threshed another wood.

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.

The price of every thing rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes so far as that thing goes.

I hold that a man had better be dead than alive when his work is done.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

My parents taught me what life is about, so I grew up the type they warned me about.

Under my leadership the Liberal Democrats would not be making polite interjections from the sidelines, we would be hammering on the doors of power.

Politics is about listening and it's about leading.