Chigozie Obioma

"I've always wanted to write something that will show the world that prior to the coming of the British to Nigeria, we had some kind of complex systems. I feel like there hasn't been an African version of, say, Milton's "Paradise Lost" which actually explored the very foundational principle of Western civilization, which would be the free will. Or even Dante Alighieri's "Inferno." So I wanted to write something cosmological, and the chi has been very fascinating to me. It was very difficult, it entailed a lot of research, even down to actually going to shrines and interviewing the last adherents of Odinani, the Igbo religion, now that most Africans are converts to either Christianity or Islam…"

"I believe that some of the strongest stories we can have begin with very simple archetypes…The great mother, or the great father, for example. And you work your way from that, slowly, to more complexity. The idea of this guy who wants to be with the woman he loves – you can say the same of the movie Gladiator, for instance. If you strip everything down to the basics, it’s just about Maximus wanting to go back to his wife and every other thing stopping him. Even Homer’s Odyssey; he just wants to go back and the entire universe is conspiring against that ambition."

"There are some rhetorical moves that I wouldn’t be able to make if I didn’t know these languages. In terms of writing figurative language, I probably pull a lot from Yoruba imagery…"

"People always ask me, why do your stories end this way? And honestly…I want to write a feelgood story. But I think that because I’m fascinated with the metaphysics of existence, I keep thinking why, of all the people who came to Cyprus, was it Jay who died? Or, I read not too long ago of a nine-year-old doing her homework and there’s a drive-by shooting and a bullet comes in through the roof and kills her. She didn’t do anything to deserve that fate. When you think about these things, and you want to write fiction around that, the path it takes you to can feel inevitable and tragic."

"Hatred is a leech: The thing that sticks to a person's skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one's spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them."

"Mother was a falconer. The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm."

"I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what become permanent can be indestructible. The things my brother read shaped him; they became his visions. He believed in them. I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what becomes permanent can be indestructible. This was the case with my brother."

"Do you not know that there is nothing the eye can see that can make it shed the tears of blood? Do you not know that there is no loss we cannot overcome"

"Listen, days decay, like food, like fish, like dead bodies. This night will decay, too and you will forget. Listen, we will forget."

"That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me."

"I'd heard someone say that the end of most things often bears a resemblance - even if faint - to their beginnings"

"I must have my pound of flesh and you must all join me in this because you caused it."

"M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description,"

"We did it. We avenged them"

"Even in his most extroverted moment, a man is concealed from others. For he cannot be fully known."

"They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail."

"Time is not a living creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can delay."

"The true being of a man is hidden behind the wall of flesh and blood from the eyes of everyone else, including his own."

"For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less."

"Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in human beings? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of love on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart?”"

"All the peace that had returned after his father finished mourning his wife for many years vanished at once. Grief returned like an army of old ants crawling into familiar holes in the soft earth of his father’s life....."

"Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief."

"in Umuahia, a town in the land of the great fathers..."

"You’re a beautiful man."