"Writing is my key to self expression. It has been my life line. Not only have I found satisfaction, I have been able to grow intellectually and emotionally through the art of writing. The hope that someone, somewhere, and somehow may benefit from my work makes me feel I have made some contribution to humanity. This feeling is simply great!"

"Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo and Nawal el Saadawi are some of my favourite authors. There are quite a number of Western authors, too numerous to mention here. I, however, identify with these three great African writers, because they have deep understanding of human psychology and pay attention to details. They accept that human beings are what they are, and behave according to the circumstances they find themselves in; no judgement."

"In the mid-eighties, I was “discovered” by Prof. Stuart Brown, a Briton, and an English lecturer at the Bayero University, Kano. He had come across an excerpt of a story I was attempting to write. He was highly impressed by what he had read and quickly assured me that I was a writer in the making. Not only did he encourage me to write, he exposed my work to the international literary scene, and made it possible for the first edition of “The Stillborn” to be published by Longman Harlow U.K."

"Ideas come from a lot of sources, experiences of friends, colleagues, neighbors, self and even strangers. However, my greatest source of gathering ideas is from listening to people talk about themselves, or about others, especially at public gatherings, weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals and the market place. A lot of ideas are also gathered at home among family members. The secret is to be a good listener, not talker."

"I do not have a special time, or place for reading or writing. Whenever and wherever I feel the urge to write, I write, using my small note book to capture passing ideas from within me, and scenes from the outside."

"My library is next door to my home office for easy access, and it is arranged in an order of priority."

"She knew education is the master key to opportunities for a better life. Education opens doors and gives an individual option in life."

"My stories are triggered by drama of life."

"The general attitude of our society towards the female, commonly regarded as the “weaker” sex. I am saddened by the fact that most women, especially in my part of the country, are trained from childhood to regard themselves as intellectually weak and incapable of attaining the highest peak in intellectual development."

"Hard work runs through my blood. It does not kill, but laziness does. If I were to write about myself I would have hundreds of titles, maybe a title for every page."

"If you want to be a good writer, write what you deeply feel you should write, not what you feel the audience will like."

"The hope that somewhere, somehow, someone may have benefitted from my ideas makes me feel I have made my little contribution to humanity. In addition to that, the national and international recognition is simply great"

"My inability to express myself well in spoken words. Perhaps this too may have been part of my training, not to be outspoken. I find spoken words unreliable, because once the words are out in the open, it is impossible to retrieve and edit them. I, therefore, discovered early in life, that writing is my best medium of self expression and a valuable tool of communication. This started with letter writing and graduated into fiction writing. In my days, letter writing was a beautiful form of communication. Courtship was elegantly done by the exchange of letters."

"Unknown to many, there are some good female writers in Northern Nigeria, but they are not easily known because they write in Hausa language. For a wider audience, I have advocated for translations, for years, at various forums, at home and abroad."

"I would say that life demands that we do not give up, no matter how hard it looks. I have lived by the simple code contained in almost all religions, believe in God and do good works. (Remember God does not leave anybody behind)."

"It is well to dream... as long as we live, we shall continue to dream. But it is also important to remember that like babies dreams are conceived but not all dreams are born alive. Some are aborted. Others are stillborn."

"Education opens doors and gives an individual option in life."

"I am saddened by the fact that most women, especially in my part of the country, are trained from childhood to regard themselves as intellectually weak and incapable of attaining the highest peak in intellectual development."

"Fiction writing, for me, is also triggered by the drama of life I witness on daily basis. I find human nature an interesting study. Human relationships, especially romantic ones, are intriguing and highly fascinating."

"When I read a book, I look out for the message the author is trying to pass across to the reader. Does the work contain wisdom? Have I learnt anything from it? I also look out for entertainment. Have I been sufficiently entertained?"

"I should mention also that besides all these, I was born into a long line of artists from my maternal side, musicians, dancers, drummers and story tellers. My major genre is prose fiction, (the novel), followed by short stories."

"When I read a book, I look out for the message the author is trying to pass across to the reader. Does the work contain wisdom? Have I learnt anything from it? I also look out for entertainment. Have I been sufficiently entertained? I believe strongly that apart from imparting knowledge to the reader, a writer should entertain the reader, because reading should be a joyous experience."

"Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing"

"It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be."

"Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man"

"When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain."

""I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously."

"I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said. She could have gloated. She could have asked, “Isn’t this the perfect man you won by deciding not to settle?” She could have been passive aggressive, or resentful, or lectured me in that world-weary way of a woman who believed that men would be men. But she didn’t, and so with the light streaming through my apartment window, I began to weep because my cousin had grace and I lacked grace."

"Love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold."

"I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces."

"Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:"

"They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done."

"Tears were so cheap now"

"The frequent flare of sad longing."

"I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone."

"I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind."

"Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation."

"You can’t nice your way to being loved."

"Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time."

"I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold"

"He would kill you, but he would do it slowly"

"Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman..."

"If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man."

"It was something like pain and different from pain."

"How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,"

"And even though I helped to clean the wounded, I had never taken anyone into my room.But I took this girl into my room.Her name was chinasa."

"You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don’t wear makeup, you don’t shave, you’re always angry, you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t use deodorant."

"trans women are trans women"

"Of course I am not worried about intimating men. The type of man who will be intimidated is exactly the type of man I have no interest in."

"Please love by giving and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you’ll know. You’ll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don’t silence that voice. Dare to take."