Taking it seriously
Guy Gunaratne
‘I have a responsibility to make sure that anything I write does the job of working emotionally in the world.’
‘I have a responsibility to make sure that anything I write does the job of working emotionally in the world.’
‘Writing a difficult scene in a play, there will be a jolt of recognition relating to more personal intimacies present in the novel I’m writing.’
‘every book is its own wild landscape, living and breathing inside the body before spilling out like marrow from the pen’
‘Medusa as a Gorgon became a feminist icon of sorts, for to look at her is to be reduced to stone from one withering stare’
‘The clock radio shocks me awake. A bulletin about the first ever AI-generated popstar to be signed by a record label.’
‘The best children’s stories assume a child’s capacity to absorb difficult feelings that don’t resolve.’
‘She spoke to hardly anyone except her vast collection of antique dolls, and constructed a bizarre hierarchy between porcelain, rag and plastic dolls that mirrors the real-life absurdities of race.’
‘I wrote to transform a profound grief. I clung to the natural environment, to the sea, the horizon, trees. They seemed permanent, something that couldn’t be lost or taken from me.’