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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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