When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.

Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre.

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.

I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.