Giles Foden Quotes

#1. 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

#2. A tremor had gone through his bowels.

George Orwell

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

Giles Foden

#6. The National Popular Vote is about getting states to convert from the winner-take-all rule. The states that pass the legislation will assign all their electoral votes to the candidate that got the most votes in the country, not just in the state.

Tom Golisano

#7. Good home-school educational plans have the kids in groups with other children often and consistently. Because common sense dictates that isolating people is never good and home-schooled children really benefit from being in those type of programs.

Rosalind Wiseman

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

Giles Foden

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

Giles Foden

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. There's that initial reticence for some athletes to take you seriously.

Lisa Guerrero

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

Giles Foden

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

Giles Foden

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

Giles Foden

#16. It's what I do. I don't deserve any awards for this, it's just music. It's just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.

Elvis Costello

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

Giles Foden

#18. Look back, and smile on perils past.

Sir Walter Scott

#19. As for me, I consider myself as a speck of the dust of the devotee's feet.

Ramakrishna

#20. 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

#21. Whenever I got any money, I invested it in books. When my savings dwindled, I got rid of everything else - pictures, furniture, china. I think you understand what it is to be a passionate collector of books ...

Arturo Perez-Reverte

#22. Human evil is a collapse of the moral faculty, but not an operating pursuing of the wrong.

Arvin Adriyan

#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. I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less.

Nancy Pelosi

#29. You don't need to get rid of religion; you have to outgrow the need for it. In other words, instead of hoping for the good life, you make the good life.

Jacque Fresco

#30. This is the essential evil of vice: it debases a man.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

Giles Foden

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. I guess in my own life I don't really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don't sit around thinking, "How am I supposed to be a man?" I don't think that I have to prove anything.

Daniel Alarcon