Oyinkan Braithwaite

“There is music blasting from Ayoola's room, she's listening to Whitney Housten's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It would be more appropriate to play Brymo or Lorde, something solemn or yearning, rather than the musical equivalent of a pack of M&Ms.”

“We are nothing if not thorough in our deception of others.”

“That’s how it has always been. Ayoola would break a glass, and I would receive the blame for giving her the drink. Ayoola would fail a class, and I would be blamed for not coaching her. Ayoola would take an apple and leave the store without paying for it, and I would be blamed for letting her get hungry.”

“It takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul, especially if you don’t want to leave any evidence of foul play.”

“I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass.”

“Here in Nigeria, being the first born is a huge, huge role. It's a huge responsibility. It's a big deal. You're treated - from the get-go, you're treated differently. You know, there's a kind of proverb here. I'm not sure what language it's in, but where they say, the eldest child is the one that opened the womb.”

“We have a wide divide between classes and we have a wide divide between cultures because we’re from different tribes, we have different religions. You don’t have to walk very far to see someone who has a really different life from you...I wouldn’t want to write a novel and people feel that I’m speaking to a Nigerian experience – I’m speaking to my experience, to the things I’m interested in, and that’s all I can do.”

“As an individual I’m attracted to strong female characters – my characters have always been people who own themselves. Even if they’re strongly doing something wrong, they’ve always been powerful people.”

“Writing for me is an act of discovery, I am learning about the characters even as I am writing them. In reality, we rarely know why people do the things they do. I think it is enough, sometimes, to simply point to something and allow the readers to reach their own conclusions.”