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

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

Every Christmas, all around Ghana, there are tons of these parties and they are full of everything that exists in human life in Ghana and worldwide.

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.

The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

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

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.

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

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

I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston.

doubters only doubt what they doubt

If you see a group of people struggling over generations and you attribute those struggles to bad character, then you do not truly believe we are all created equally.

Humans merely share the Earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.

Knights are cavalry, bishops are archers, rooks are cannons and queens are wizards.

Kids will use their own system at the stage that they are, they're not (learning merely by) imitating you.

Everyone knows that the Zionist regime is a tool in the hands of the United States and British governments.

There are a lot of queers starved for entertainment from their own community.

God throws dice, what can I say?

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.

The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.