Ru Freeman quotes:

Sri Lanka is a small island, and the war affected everybody. Everybody knew somebody who was killing or being killed.

There are other sources, but Wikipedia is a good start.

Such bliss is not meant to last. In my husband's house, my children were my real gifts.

Diatonic, he heard the word in his head. Chromatic, pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic, each iteration of the scale opening innumerable possibilities for harmony. He thought about the Pythagorean major third, the Didymus comma, the way the intervals sound out of tune rather than as though they were different notes. This, he thought, was where his brilliance at mathematics bled into his love of music; music was the realm in which his mathematical brain danced.

Every new thing is a result of everything you wrote before.

Fiona McCrae is a really amazing editor. Really smart and very astute about what a story needs.

I really try to avoid, you know, rolling out the history. The people are so important to me, and what happens to them, how they react, how things happen to them, this is what is important. I feel that if I can tell THAT story well, then people will go and Google the rest and fill in what they need to know.

I think a lot, so I don't spend a lot of time actually writing - I do that part very quickly. That helps, for me. To keep track of the characters.

I was interested in writing something that has meaning in the larger context of global conflicts anywhere.

My life is very busy with a lot of things, and so I don't get uninterrupted time. When I do, I can just write all day.

There is no right and wrong, and precepts are for fools. Every thing is just as it is! And we must experience things without condemning them, because if we condemn them, then we are becoming too involved.

War defined my entire childhood and youth and most of my adulthood too - and in the US, it continues to do so.