"There are so many aspects of ourselves that we have left unexplored, that we must explore because they begin to make so much sense. And then you begin to walk in your own path."

"Write your heart out and persevere, persevere, persevere!"

"I grew up in Zambia surrounded by books but I was not much of a reader. I did however talk a lot and tell a lot of stories as a child. I think it was this passion for telling stories that eventually translated into writing much later in my life."

"My advice to all writers is focus and invest time in your writing ...At the end of the day, it is your writing. It is your story and you have to take responsibility for it and not rely or expect help from anyone."

"In stories I look for originality. I am also big on characters. A story that has me thinking about a character or characters long after I have turned the last page works for me."

"I don’t dwell on regrets. There are many things in my life I could, with hindsight, have done differently but I don’t regret them. The mistakes have contributed to who and where I am today."

"Writing is very subjective. It is also solitary. My advice to all writers is focus and invest time in your writing. Do your homework in terms of submitting manuscripts to the right publishers etc. At the end of the day, it is your writing. It is your story and you have to take responsibility for it and not rely or expect help from anyone."

"Ding. The cabin lights came on...The flight attendants paced the aisles like antic tightrope walkers, with fixed smiles and mussed make-up. They were done with coddling. They snatched Naila's blankets and demanded her headset, they claimed her rubbish and chastised her tilted seat.”"

"Equality!’ he cried. ‘You see? Only from level ground can you grow new crops. The war taught me that all men are equal before death, black and white. And yesterday,’ he shrugged, ‘Miss Matha showed me that this equality thing probably includes the females, too."

"…partly because I’m perceived as black…the idea I could look at my mother and say to her that I’m not black makes no sense. To me, blackness is just part of what the family is."

"The Civil Rights Movement in the US was all about logjams and blockades. Martin Luther King is the one who said “a riot is the language of the unheard”. And the decolonisation of our country wasn’t just boycotts and speeches. It was bombing bridges, too."

"Stephen Hawking once said, ‘Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.’ Every small stray opens up a new way, an Eden of forking digressions."

"I probably seem quite at ease now saying I’m mixed race, I’m black, I’m Zambian, but for a while that was quite torturous, quite angsty. As a young woman I wasn’t very tender or nice to myself…Now I’m older, I’m much more able to be tender and kind to the younger me that I see in the book."

"…It's a very interesting position to be in as an immigrant to the United States - now a citizen - who grew up in a country where the word immigrant meant people who were coming into Zambia, not people who were leaving, fleeing as refugees to go to the West…"

"I think there was an impulse in me to write women as central to the text. Part of that is my own limitations as a writer: being able to delineate the varieties of female experience is clearly easier for someone who’s lived as a woman, and projecting myself into male characters is harder for me. It’s something I have to really work on…"

"Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with."

"They were not kings. The empire was a frikkin sham. They were colonialists, and for that you only need brute force – nothing to boast of when you have it. Power’s just an accident that depends on the weakness of others."

"Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied"