Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; weve become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.

Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.

You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?