“I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a...” — Taiye Selasi Quote

“I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.”

“I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!”

“I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.”

“The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.”

“That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening.”

“I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.”

“It's funny because, growing up, I found inspiration from watching Steffi Graf and Amanda Coetzer, a South African who was in the top 10 for many years. Oh, and then there's someone I've gotten to know over the last few years: Martina Navratilova.”

“Some of these things I saw in foreign films - African films, Cuban films - long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects.”

“The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.”

“When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical.”

“May I suggest that people in many African countries could be suffering from donation fatigue?”