Uzodinma Iweala

Our racial past and future is something that we Americans must address.

There are multiple levels of 'we' and multiple groups that can constitute this idea of who we are. We need to be aware of who we are including and excluding.

I think the more complex your idea of who someone is or who a particular group is, the less able you are to separate 'we' and 'outside' or 'us and them.' I think that that's something that we really, really need to pay attention to.

When I speak about 'we,' it gets very complex very quickly. Having grown up in the United States, but also being very much a member of Nigerian societies and also different parts of Nigerian societies, I understand that we construct particular 'we's.'

I think, all too often, this society has too monolithic a definition of what a black American is.

As Americans, I think we're a very entitled bunch.

In terms of medicine, I've generally been pretty interested in public health issues as they relate to sub-Saharan Africa on a broad scale - HIV/AIDS, malaria etc.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

I suppose I'm pulled towards fiction because I really like the freedom it gives me.

I've been writing since I was really young.

I find the sort of unwitting European American outsider who wants to come to Africa to help is a very problematic construction. It's problematic because you don't want to tell people don't aid, don't help, when people feel a need to.

In general, Barack Hussein Obama brings us face to face with the discomfort our society feels with this idea of difference.

America is decidedly not 'post-racial.'

It's true that people will take advantage of you in Nigeria, but this happens everywhere in the world.

My parents have raised me and my three siblings to be aware of the privilege we have been afforded and the responsibility it brings.

I think 'Beasts of No Nation' is a novel that hopefully will affect each person who reads it in a different way.

I'm not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I'm not saying it doesn't exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There's music, there's art, there's culture.

I'm a black man in the United States, and there's no two ways about that. I have a shared common experience with other black men, and through that, there's an automatic understanding.

When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It's only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was.

Anybody who tells you they're not scared when starting a new book project is a very good liar.

I think the fact that we don't really... that the world really doesn't acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don't really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news articles; that... that it's just kind of glossed over as this thing.

People just think Africa is this one thing. So if you're from Nigeria, then you're the same as somebody from Kenya; not realizing that within Nigeria, right, we have 250 different ethnic groups, right? Two hundred and fifty different languages.

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.

I would say, number one, don't worry about getting published. Just write. Number two, just write. Three is make sure you read.

I hear a good song and I start thinking, 'Oh shoot. You know there's a story that can be told to this,' and whatnot.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

Sometimes you just wanna go out, see your action movie, be done with it, come home. You know, and, like, you see 'The Matrix' or whatever, you see whatever film it is, and you're like, 'Oh cool,' whatever.

I don't think that one should beat himself or herself over the head if immediately you're not like Jesus Christ or, you know, Gandhi or whoever. But I think the idea is to... to look at those examples and try to... try to operate in a way that every day you live or every interaction you have pushes you further along to operating with that mindset.

Everybody has an equal right to be on this earth and to be happy on this earth and to achieve on this earth. That's kind of the way that I would like to try and go about living.

We grew up going to church, and I believe in God. I don't know that I have the ability to define what or who or how God is. You know, I think that religion kind of messes people up in that regard. That's just my own personal philosophy.

There are skills you pick up on in a clinical environment in terms of how to ask questions, what to look for, how to listen that serve one well when trying to write.

People don't talk about the amount of destruction in terms of human lives that happen, whether it's through slavery, or through, for example, what Belgium was doing in the Congo - the fragmentation of society that happened after that destruction of human life.

The images that we see of Africa are so... that are so engrained in our minds are of this place that is terrible - like hell on earth. And that doesn't acknowledge the positive things - the many, many, many positive things - that people are doing.

It takes time for people to understand how, as an individual, I can have an impact on the way that society works.

It takes time for people to understand how to hold leaders accountable.

I think South Africa would be in a lot worse position had you not had visionaries like the Mandelas or the Oliver Tambos or the people there who came together after... both during apartheid and afterwards to create and structure their society.

There are some people who will tell you oil is the greatest thing that ever happened to Nigeria. And there are other people who will tell you it's the worst thing that ever happened.

I feel like it's not Africans who are afraid of China's rise in Africa. It's the West that's afraid of China's rise in Africa.

No one can really relate to somebody who has given up entirely.

It's a beautiful thing, the desire to help a fellow human who is maybe in a rough spot.

Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.

Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.

I don't know if I want to be a writer.

Nigeria shed the last of a succession of brutal military dictatorships in 1997 and adopted a democratic form of government only in 1999. Our elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011 were complicated and fraught with tension, but each one has shown remarkable progress.

Kidnapping causes a long-term rupture in the psyche of those kidnapped and of those who wait for their return. It doesn't end.

Nigeria is a difficult place. It is not a country for the faint of heart. On a good day, when our larger cities such as Abuja, Lagos, and Kano are filled with the teeming masses going in so many different directions, flogged by the heat and sun, bumping down uneven roads all in the name of 'the hustle,' it can appear chaotic.

Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.

Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned?

Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head - because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself.

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority.