Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English...?

We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.

It is certainly impossible to imagine forgiving the enemy while their animus remains undefeated.

The future looks like gasoline. . . . crude oil . . . is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.