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

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.

The perception is that more important people watch news in the evenings than in the mornings.

I'm inspired by nature. Other artist's work is important for developing my perception.

It could be my downfall, but I don't think it is - Hollywood is run on perception, and if you stray off the path of what you want to do with your career, it's suicide.

While only about half of the voters feel they know very much about Reagan or what he stands for, the Republicans who do have a very positive perception of him.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

I definitely don't look my age. So I actively look for roles that will help people change their perception of me.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject; the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.

The biggest problem with dyslexic kids is not the perceptual problem, it is their perception of themselves. That was my biggest problem.

Outside of being an actress, I feel like being out is the biggest way that gay people can change perception. There are people that give millions of dollars to gay organizations but are closeted to their own families.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

When you look at the state of the economy right now, you have to set a priority. And my top priority is the deficit of jobs and economic growth, and especially this perception that the United States could be falling behind especially Asian economies.

But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement, and depends for its growth on a people's entry into the main current of world-events.

There's this perception sometimes around here that I'm this Hollywood guy.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

The UN's unique legitimacy flows from a universal perception that it pursues a larger purpose than the interests of one country or a small group of countries.