Ayobami Adebayo

“In 2010, I was working in a bank in Lagos. It was a crazy job with long working hours. I had to leave for the office by 5:30 A.M., and sometimes I wouldn't be back until midnight.”

“I don't suffer from SCD myself, but I do carry the gene. This means that if I married another person who carried the gene, there would be a danger our children would suffer from the disease.”

“I wanted to write about extended family systems. You have people you can fall back on, and it's good. But what if you don't fit into what is expected of you?”

“I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I'd won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories.”

“I'd always been interested in Nigeria's past.”

“I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The 'well brought up' child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly.”

“When I had a full-time job, I would write dialogue and sketch characters on my commute and during meetings. Now, I forsake showers and regular meals and stay at my desk for hours, taking breaks to drink tea and eat something sweet, usually cake.”

“I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing.”

“So love is like a test,but in what sense?To what end?Who was carrying out the test?But I think I did believe that Love had immense power to unearth all that was good in us,refine us and reveal to us the better versions of ourselves.”

“I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that.”

“My mother used to laugh that if they asked me to clean up my room, I would spend so much time reading every tiny bit of paper, a receipt or whatever, instead of throwing it in the trash.”

“When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.”

“There's this idea that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder in an African family is a childless woman - and the lowest rung of all is a motherless child.”

“My mother has a lot of sisters. They had very, very interesting conversations. Because I was a quiet child, I would sit in the room and listen to these stories. I think I developed a curiosity about the life of other people from that, and an interest in looking at what was lying beneath the layer of what people present in public.”