I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.
Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.
The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.
The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.
I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
