Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

I keep writing stories that I might want to bring to life one day.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

My writing process often begins with a question. I write down ideas and let them stew for about a year. Then, when I sit down to write, I make a list of characters and try to see how they fit.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I picture my books as movies when I get stuck, and when I'm working on a new idea, the first thing I do is hit theaters to work out pacing and mood.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'