At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

The higher you go, the fewer women there 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.

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.