I don't believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics.

Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important.

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

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

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

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

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.