“Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lea...” — Romesh Gunesekera Quote

Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

Most childhoods are full of anxiety, but that tends to get smoothed over, so you have a sense of nostalgia.

My parents knew a wider range of people than most, and so we had actors, journalists, politicians, planters, sportsmen and women and business folk all coming in and out of the places we lived in. Although my parents were not wealthy, they lived a legendary and amazingly cosmopolitan life.

I was around when there was only one channel and when that second channel arrived, it came with the wonderful world of Disney on a Sunday night. We would drop our bicycles and run home to see it, it was just pure escapism.

A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.

I arrived in Hollywood twenty pounds overweight and as strong as an ox.

Life is lived on levels and arrived at in stages.

Well my briefing was that Honduras was a small and vulnerable country just back on the path towards democracy it was about to have just before I arrived, the first elections for a civilian president in more than 9 years.