I do need to find inner tranquillity and get into a "zone" before I switch on the computer to work on a story. Only after this do I enter the story world, where I meet the characters and, together, we work through the day and night.

I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted.

Kenya is an immense land with a capacity for healing.

The truth, and nothing but the truth, is that dawn begins with a wrestling match with my soul and a systematic rejection of all the other useful possibilities a day offers. I make obeisance to the story, its characters, and the muse with burnt offerings.

Matters of the subconscious affect reality in ways we don't quite realize.

It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.

I like talking to myself and making patterns out of the letters of the alphabet on blank surfaces.