"You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup." — Ben Okri

Fire is one of my temperaments. It is behind all my work... Fire is a chemical presence.

Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly.

We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world.

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.