The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.

Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.

Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.

We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.

You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.