I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World.

Men blackmailing you as a woman leads you to trivialise sex and say 'it's not important, what is important is myself as a person, no one owns me because of sex.'

In all my novels, I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today.

A hungry man is an angry one.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

I'm not just a feminist - I'm a feminist plus.