Quotes from Ayobami Adebayo

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.