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

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 you're in charge of the grand story there's still memory. The other stories do not go away.

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

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.

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

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.