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

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.

Christians should never fail to sense the operation of an angelic glory. It forever eclipses the world of demonic powers, as the sun does a candle's light.

The employee is regarded by the employer merely in the light of his value as an operative. His productive capacity alone is taken into account.

In like a dimwit, out like a light.

I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all. But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident.

I like my coffee light.

So the thing that's beautiful about the Rolleiflex is that I open the camera up from the top and put my face in and that the camera's all about composition and all about light.

I'm looking forward to providing the men of Seattle with an evening where they can kick back, light up a cigar and enjoy a night to themselves. Women, we can't technically keep you out, but please stay at home.

The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass.

Of all creatures in this visible world, light is the most glorious; of all light, the light of the sun without compare excels the rest.

I am a free man. I feel as light as a feather.

Bright light is injurious to those who see nothing.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

Every day some new fact comes to light - some new obstacle which threatens the gravest obstruction. I suppose this is the reason which makes the game so well worth playing.

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

Treat your friends as you do your best pictures, and place them in their best light.

To light one candle to God and another to the Devil is the principle of wisdom.

Thought the sun is gone, I have a light.

I was relatively technically adept. I can edit and wire up a light.

The high food value of field beans and the shortage of supply due to the light yields of 1915 and 1916 render them of great importance in the regions to which they are adapted.