As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.

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

When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.

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.