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

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.

Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.

We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.

Love is not really a mystery. It is a process like anything else. A process that requires trust, effort, focus and commitment by two willing partners

I believe in fate and I believe that things happen for a reason but I don't think that there's a high power, necessarily. I believe in karma very much though.

Long ago made it a principle of my life to cultivate a positive frame of mind, to strive to project it and to share it with those I meet. It is a principle that has served me well.

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.

The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother's loss makes itself felt.

Nothing like trapping the gentlemen where they couldn't get away.

The cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free man acknowledges. It is the only security that free man desires.

You're young and you're bulletproof and invincible. But never underestimate the power of other people's love and prayer.