Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.

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

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

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

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

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.