Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

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.

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

Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

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.

I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.

Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not 'naturally' in charge as men.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

Because she said what she thought and because she smiled only when she felt like smiling, and not constantly and vacuously, America's cheapest caricature was cast on her, the angry black woman.

What is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a people. ... Culture does not make people. People make culture.

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.

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.

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 premise of chivalry is female weakness.

Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.

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.

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.

Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.

Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service.