Giles Foden quotes:

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

  • 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.

  • Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

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