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.

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

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

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

I get turned on by the idea of an essence - finding the essence of the thing.

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.

Kenya is an immense land with a capacity for healing.