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

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 poss….

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 encoun….

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..

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..

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral fai….

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..

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

I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level..

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 w….

In my perfect imagination, with stern discipline I rise with the first bird, salute the dawn, have a healthy breakfast of fruits, wander over to my f….

Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never ….

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 remem….

Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror..

Kenya is an immense land with a capacity for healing..

I don't think Kenya is the only country that tries to induce amnesia - it seems to be a global phenomenon. But offenses do not die. They do not disap….

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

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

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