The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips.

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.

The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips.

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

As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.

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.