Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think white women need to wake up and say, 'Not all women are white,' three times in front of the mirror.
I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.
Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out
There can be an extremist idea of purity. It's so easy to fall afoul of the ridiculously high standard set there.
There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.
We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.
How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.
We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.
I think the Left doesn't know how to be a tribe in the way the Right does. The Left is very cannibalistic. It eats its own.
My greatest vanity is my skin. It is the colour of gingerbread and, thanks to my mother's genes, smooth and mostly blemish-free.
There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.
You can have ambition But not too much You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man
I think it's possible to have been a happy child, as I was, and still question and push back with regard to societal conventions.
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.
You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?' Aunty Ifeka said. 'Your life belongs to you and you alone.
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'.
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.
This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.
Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.
We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.
At some point I was a HappyAfricanFeminist who does not hate men. And who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.
I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.
Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.
I don't think it's a good thing to talk about women's issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don't think that's true.
You know, I don't think of myself as anything like a 'global citizen' or anything of the sort. I am just a Nigerian who's comfortable in other places.
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?
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.
I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with.
I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.
Privilege blinds, because it's in its nature to blind. Don't let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.
Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important.
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.
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.
Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
I think I'm ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian - that's home; my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America.
Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
'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.
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.
...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.
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.