Aminatta Forna

“Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?”

“What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.”

“My family's a ruling family.”

“A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas.”

“I'm at my desk for about 9:30 A.M., and I stay there all day. Then there's a lot of checking Facebook and eBay and that sort of thing.”

“I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.”

“Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.”

“A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.”

“I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.”

“Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.”

“And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.”

“No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.”

“I don't have very many little fetishes, but the one I do have is that I like a particular mug to drink out of. It's just a small china cup, and I get very upset if my husband moves it.”

“I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.”

“Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...”

“A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.”

“Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.”

“My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.”

“War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.”

“Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.”