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" I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston. "

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" So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual. "

Taiye Selasi

Individual

Politics

Literature

" The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness. "

" As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own. "

" The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou. "

Taiye Selasi

Africa

First

" I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones. "

" I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play. "

" When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge. "

" Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre. "

" The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips. "

" As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully. "

" I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart. "

" I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete. "

" As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do. "

" When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen. "

" That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening. "

" Every Christmas, all around Ghana, there are tons of these parties and they are full of everything that exists in human life in Ghana and worldwide. "

" I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims. "

" I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford. "

" I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create! "