"Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again."

"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."

"You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel."

"You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else."

"I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries."

"You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel."

"The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town."

"I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door."

"The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled."

"It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing."

"Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous."

"When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world."

"In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind."

"Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light."

"It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country."

"I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure."

"It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow."

"A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch."

"As a writer, one is busy with archaeology."

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