In Sri Lanka A Well-told Lie Is

Every Immigrant Family, It Seems, Has Someone Who Does Not Belong In The New Country They Have Come To. It Feels Like Permanent Exile To That One Brother Or Wife Who Cannot Stand A Silent Fate In Boston Or London Or Melbourne. I’ve Met Many Who Remain Haunted By The Persistent Ghost Of An Earlier Place.

What He Would Say, He Cannot Say To This Woman Whose Openness Is Like A Wound, Whose Youth Is Not Mortal Yet. He Cannot Alter What He Loves Most In Her, Her Lack Of Compromise, Where The Romance Of The Poems She Loves Still Sits With Ease In The Real World. Outside These Qualities He Knows There Is No Order In The World.

One Of The Things That Happens In Novels It's Almost Like A Continual Debate With Yourself. That's Why You're Writing The Book. It's Why You Create Characters: So You Can Argue With Yourself.

How Can You Smile As Though Your Whole Life Hasn't Capsized

You Can See That The Care He Took Defiling The Beauty He Had Forced In Them Was As Precise And Clean As His Good Hands Which At Night Had Developed The Negatives, Floating The Sheets In The Correct Acids And Watching The Faces And Breasts And Pubic Triangles And Sofas Emerge. The Making And Destroying Coming From The Same Source, Same Lust, Same Surgery His Brain Was Capable Of. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)