Giles Foden Quotes & Sayings

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

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe. — Giles Foden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The forgiveness that comes of patient interpretation seems impossible when those nearest to your heart are threatened. — Giles Foden

Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures. — Giles Foden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They thought it was an enemy but it was only their own reflection. — Giles Foden

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

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

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

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

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

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