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

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

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

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 live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!

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

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