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!

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.

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

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

I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.

How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?

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