I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

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.

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

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

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

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.

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

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

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

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

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

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.

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

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.

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.

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

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

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

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

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.

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

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

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

It doubles your perception to write from the point of view of someone youre not.

A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.

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.

When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense. But unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible.

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

The fact is, as actors, everything we do, bad or good, is a contribution. To me, it is a positive thing to give people as wide a range of human behavior with some sense of understanding of that behavior or some clue to it.

It's just exciting to be part of something that is brand-new.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

No one ever won a game by resigning.

I was working at a phone company. I got tired of my life and wanted to change it, so I did.

That's my life in there. It would never be possible today to ask as many questions as I did.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

The money can be a hindrance to someone like me because the danger is that you start thinking, 'Is that a $20 million take?' That kind of thing, and being self-critical.

I want to do good work, but having kids and a life outside of that is important, too. If you don't have anybody around who loves you, then what's it all for? You're just lonely in the end.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

I'm not an NRA member, but that doesn't mean I didn't appreciate shooting blanks out of a machine gun.

I was born in Riverside and spent my whole growing-up years in Florence, a little township on the Delaware River. I tell people that I'm from the West Coast of New Jersey.

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

From 1941 to 1945 we won a war by enlisting the whole-hearted support of all our people and all our resources.