Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

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

Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.

I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.

I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.

I didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist.