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

Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.

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

For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.

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

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.

Even if we want to eradicate our ghosts, our dead, our murdered, even if you erase a name and the record of the existence of a person, somebody remembers.