Foden Quotes

#1. I grew up in the African bush in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda, which is my thing. I love the smell of the dust as you bump along in a Land-Rover. I go back there often.

Giles Foden

#2. The search for inventive ways of telling the tale of Christ's birth has been going on a long time; in a way, difference was there from the start with Luke and Matthew.

Giles Foden

#3. In Kenya, crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of successive Kenyan governments to control either.

Giles Foden

#4. I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.

Giles Foden

#5. A writer who always has his characters "walk" is missing opportunities.

Sol Stein

#6. ... la kuvunda halian ubani. There is no incense for something rotting. And that is the condition of the world. This I know.

Giles Foden

#7. We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become.

Harold Bloom

#8. I had never classified myself with other girls. I was not of their species; I was different. I had never thought my future would be like theirs.

Jacqueline Kelly

#9. The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

Giles Foden

#10. The forgiveness that comes of patient interpretation seems impossible when those nearest to your heart are threatened.

Giles Foden

#11. Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it - at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.

Bill Gates

#12. Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.

Giles Foden

#13. Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.

Giles Foden

#14. You know what I loved about 'Sideways'? Well, the wine, of course. But it was one of the few movies in which being a writer was realistically depicted. I loved how the Paul Giamatti character tries so ineptly to talk about his book.

Kristan Higgins

#15. Suffering produces a recursion to the tribe, to one's own kind. When a lot of people suffer, tribes lose their head.

Giles Foden

#16. Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

Giles Foden

#17. Foreign students add cultural value to their British peers, who need an international outlook.

Giles Foden

#18. If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line.
[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]

Max Frisch

#19. A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.

Irvin S. Cobb

#20. I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks.

Groucho Marx

#21. My father was an agricultural economist. In 1989 he was posted to Mbarara, a small town on the Uganda-Rwanda border.

Giles Foden

#22. I prefer a world with many beliefs and religions.
It stimulates my faith to keep growing day by day.

Toba Beta

#23. Ordinary Kenyans rightly want to be able to shop safely, and there is a long history of them doing just that, irrespective of their religion or that of the shop owner.

Giles Foden

#24. At school, I got into the whole CB thing, hiding a transceiver in my study-bedroom with which I'd make appointments to meet girls in town. I wasn't good enough at physics to take it much further than fun, but I suppose there was a need to communicate.

Giles Foden

#25. They thought it was an enemy but it was only their own reflection.

Giles Foden

#26. To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.

Giles Foden

#27. It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders.

Giles Foden

#28. Riches are intended for the comfort of life, and not life for the purpose of hoarding riches.

Saadi

#29. I was lucky that I made a few movies in a row that people really responded to - not me, particularly, but the films as a whole were appreciated.

Julia Roberts

#30. You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties.

Giles Foden

#31. Hadie: At first you didn't tell me because you didn't know me well enough. And then you couldn't tell me because you knew me too well.

Komal Kant

#32. I like Ireland because it means I'm near France.

Harry Harrison

#33. I can't think of a specific meal, but my favourite country for food has got to be France. I love those restaurants in the middle of the village squares.

Giles Foden

#34. Don't wear yourself out trying to compete with others. You were uniquely designed by God to do great things with the talents He blessed you with. Celebrate who you are and keep working hard to become a better you!

Theresa Lewis

#35. Birth is violent, whether it be the birth of a child or the birth of an idea.

Marianne Williamson

#36. In any culture, if information is to maximise in a contextual space, and new meanings be born, the original story has to have substance - there's gotta be gold in them thar hills.

Giles Foden

#37. An important book for our times, in which one woman's determination and refusal to consent sets an example of courage and honesty.

Giles Foden

#38. My father worked in agriculture, and I got to travel round remote rural areas with him and see a bit of the landscape and people.

Giles Foden

#39. Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

Giles Foden

#40. From 1971 to 1993, my family lived in a number of African countries, including Malawi, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Nigeria, as well as Uganda itself.

Giles Foden