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.

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.

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.

How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?

Maybe I’m not the Boy Scout you think I am.

The intelligent person is not one who merely knows what is good and what is bad. The intelligent person is one who, when he sees what is good, follows it, and when he sees evil, shuns it.

Sometimes when you're on tour, it feels like you're living the same day over and over again.

If you're alive, you're a creative person.

The collective experience of watching a great film together in a room is a transcendent moment that will never die.

And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

World has things which full fill man needs, but not greeds.

If you do not clean up, you won't be stronger in the long run.

By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.