Quotes from Buchi Emecheta

Relatives watching wanted and expected me to break down and cry, thereby devaluing my inner sorrow. Maybe if I had not stayed in cold England for eighteen years - England, a country where people cry in their hearts and not with their eyes - I would have done so. Eighteen years is a long time, and like the people I live with, I cried in my heart.

Dreams soon assume substance

The concept of whiteness could cover a multitude of sins.

Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why then did they claim to be superior?

She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks.

The fear of everybody was that the man might give in and say, After all, it's her life. However a thing like that is not permitted in Nigeria; you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community and not just to him or her.

Then I ran to her and our relatives laughed. The knots of bystanders were horrified at the loss of her expensive tusk ornaments, but with my hand firmly clasped in hers she reminded them, with her face beaming,'When has it ever been a virtue to be rich in wealth and poor in people?' The relatives nodded. They understood her very well- why have heaven an earth when you have no one to share it with?

I was glad, though, for those boys whom we helped to get places at Paddington Coll e of Education. Eighteen months later one boy got his two ' A' levels. And to think that when I first met him his greatest ambition was to kill a white policeman!

Writers simply have to write, and not worry so much about what people think, because public opinion is such a difficult horse to ride.

When people are not educated enough for the job market, it is like a time bomb ticking away which could explode in the streets.

If you don't have children the longing for them will kill you, and if you do, the worrying over them will kill you.

The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.

Yet the more I think about it the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves. That we make life intolerable for one another. I cannot live up to your standards, senior wife. So I have to set my own.

1975 was International Women's Year. I had never heard the word 'feminism' before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general. I did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category. I had the first inkling of it on 28 June 1975 when the International Women's League invited me to give a speech.

Before I spoke, the general talk was drifting to women's emancipation, birth control in the Third World, and how the Third World women were suffering. I don't know why I hated people talking about us like that......... So I got up and shocked all those ladies, telling them to mind their own business and leave us Third World women alone. One could have heard a pin drop. I thought at one time I would be thrown out. But I was not.

I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.

Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.

I work toward the liberation of women, but I'm not feminist. I'm just a woman.