Words matter. These are the best Ayobami Adebayo Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
‘Stay with Me’ started out being very political, largely because I’m a little obsessed with politics.
When I had a full-time job, I would write dialogue and sketch characters on my commute and during meetings. Now, I forsake showers and regular meals and stay at my desk for hours, taking breaks to drink tea and eat something sweet, usually cake.
To be transported into another world is my very favourite part of reading.
I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that.
Never lend people money you can’t afford to give them as a gift.
My mother used to laugh that if they asked me to clean up my room, I would spend so much time reading every tiny bit of paper, a receipt or whatever, instead of throwing it in the trash.
Wole Soyinka’s ‘Death and the King’s Horseman’ is a play I go back to and I read often.
In 2010, I was working in a bank in Lagos. It was a crazy job with long working hours. I had to leave for the office by 5:30 A.M., and sometimes I wouldn’t be back until midnight.
When I started working on ‘Stay With Me,’ I thought it would take two years to complete the novel.
When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.
I don’t suffer from SCD myself, but I do carry the gene. This means that if I married another person who carried the gene, there would be a danger our children would suffer from the disease.
Having children does become tied to a sense of identity and our value as humans.
There’s a Yoruba proverb which roughly translates into, ‘What turns its face to one person has turned its back on the other.’ It’s always made me think about how deeply subjective our experience of the world can be.
I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The ‘well brought up’ child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly.
There is a strong view in Nigeria, as in many other cultures, that a marriage is not complete without children. I don’t agree; I’m wary of the idea that people have to have some particular functionality in order to be full members of society.
I wanted to write about extended family systems. You have people you can fall back on, and it’s good. But what if you don’t fit into what is expected of you?
I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It’s a long list that keeps growing.
I’d always been interested in Nigeria’s past.
I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I’d won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories.
I think a large part of being human centers on the state of being alone, and we try to mitigate that in so many ways.
