If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out

My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.