I think every morning we wake up offers a new beginning, a new way of stepping into the day. I think every conversation could be a new chance.

Kenya is an immense land with a capacity for healing.

Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.

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.

Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.

Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.

One day, I was running to the river. Along the way there was the most exquisite butterfly, a tiny little thing, on the pavement. I kind of jumped over it. And then two days later I woke up in the middle of the night with a character running, jumping over butterflies on the streets of Nairobi. After that, I followed the story. The story wrote itself.