I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn’t matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt;...

The truth has become an insult.

What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It’s not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child...

‘No Sweetness Here’ is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.

Your life belongs to you and you alone.

The problem with looking in the mirror is that you never know how you will feel about what you see. Sometimes, when my hormones are out of sync, I have no interest in the mirror,...

Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.

There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first...

Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had...

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in ‘real’ African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

If you followed the media you’d think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that’s not the case; so it’s important to engage with the other Africa.

Sometimes novels are considered ‘important’ in the way medicine is – they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we ´should’ be rather than recognizing how we are.

The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they...

My greatest vanity is my skin. It is the colour of gingerbread and, thanks to my mother’s genes, smooth and mostly blemish-free.

She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how...

She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always...

It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it...

While writing ‘Half of a Yellow Sun,’ I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology...

We never actively remember death,’ Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.

In particular I want to talk about natural black hair, and how it’s not just hair. I mean, I’m interested in hair in sort of a very aesthetic way, just the beauty of hair, but...

Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated...

The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership.

He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them

I would come, many years later, to understand why ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ is considered ‘an important novel’, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked...

Greatness depends on where you are coming from.

But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?” and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi

One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.

Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their...

I’ve always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don’t.

Stories matter.

One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the...

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.

Mama had greeted him the traditional way that women were supposed to, bending low and offering him her back so that he would pat it with his fan made of the soft, straw-colored tail of...

And it’s wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It’s possible to love something and still condescend to it.

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

Her bladder felt painfully, solidly full, as though it would burst and release not urine but the garbled prayers she was muttering.

Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness...

Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.

There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’.

They had both wanted it to happen and they both wished it had not; what mattered now was that nobody else should ever know.

Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. You’re always battling to...