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. Ayobami Adebayo Read Quote
I think there is a dissonance between how much is expected of you as a young person, whether you are a man or a woman: you are supposed to go to university; you get a master’s degree, maybe two, particularly if you come from the middle class. Ayobami Adebayo Read Quote
I’m still very interested in the things that happened in the ’80s and the ’70s because I think that they were very important years for Nigeria. In the ’80s, we were under a military dictatorship for quite a while, and I think that the way we engage with our country as citizens was shaped in many ways by the events that took place in that time. Ayobami Adebayo Read Quote
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. Ayobami Adebayo Read Quote
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. Ayobami Adebayo Read Quote
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. Ayobami Adebayo Read Quote
When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Ayobami Adebayo Read Quote
