Ayobami Adebayo

“I think a large part of being human centers on the state of being alone, and we try to mitigate that in so many ways.”

“I must have listened to at least 10 covers of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' - Jeff Buckley's cover is usually my go-to song.”

“Usually, by the time I hit 'save' before taking a nap, my word count has gone down, but the world I'm creating feels more tangible than it did before.”

“There's a Yoruba proverb which roughly translates into, 'What turns its face to one person has turned its back on the other.' It's always made me think about how deeply subjective our experience of the world can be.”

“I am interested in the idea that people should be able to define their own happiness.”

“I wander around online, but until I hit my daily word count, I only leave my desk to make some tea, eat, or to answer the door. At 7 P.M., I give up and spend the rest of the evening catching up with the news.”

“I used to think that most published writers, the ones I admired, had a muse, or a special connection to the universe, to nature, or to aliens - something inaccessible to me that caused their prose to flow onto the page, already perfect.”

“I think there is a dissonance between how much is expected of you as a young person, whether you are a man or a woman: you are supposed to go to university; you get a master's degree, maybe two, particularly if you come from the middle class.”

“Wole Soyinka's 'Death and the King's Horseman' is a play I go back to and I read often.”

“To be transported into another world is my very favourite part of reading.”

“When I started working on 'Stay With Me,' I thought it would take two years to complete the novel.”

“Having children does become tied to a sense of identity and our value as humans.”

“I wanted to explore expectations we have of people - what a woman should be, what a man should be. And if they don't meet our own interpretation of who they should be because of their gender, their background, their ethnic group, we then come to conclusions about them that are not accurate.”

“When I was in my late teens, a couple of friends passed away suddenly. This was quite distressing, but after a while, as tends to happen when one is once or twice removed from grief, I stopped thinking about them all the time.”

“There is a strong view in Nigeria, as in many other cultures, that a marriage is not complete without children. I don't agree; I'm wary of the idea that people have to have some particular functionality in order to be full members of society.”

“Never lend people money you can't afford to give them as a gift.”

“'Stay with Me' started out being very political, largely because I'm a little obsessed with politics.”

“I'm still startled when people ask me for writing advice.”

“I'm still very interested in the things that happened in the '80s and the '70s because I think that they were very important years for Nigeria. In the '80s, we were under a military dictatorship for quite a while, and I think that the way we engage with our country as citizens was shaped in many ways by the events that took place in that time.”

“I think, for women in particular, it's kind of like you're expected to get married, have a child, and then you get to be a person. But you don't need someone else - be it a spouse or child - to complete or validate your existence. Being human is enough and should be enough, and I hope that we all come to a point where we can accept that.”