48 Quotes by Petina Gappah

I don't want to write because I have to; I want to write because I want to. Sometimes, when writers write because they have to, the results are disastrous.

If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.

I get irritated by the term 'African writer', because it doesn't mean anything to me.

There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I'm not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different.

What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.

I speak English. I dream in it. I cannot separate my English from my Shona; I see the world with those two languages.

It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, 'What is it that I want from my life?' This question kept haunting me: 'Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer?

I'm not even sure that I want to go back... The Zimbabwe that I really loved, the Zimbabwe that I grew up in, just isn't there anymore, and I'm not sure about the country that has replaced it.

Ian Smith thought his Rhodesia would last 1,000 years: it lasted less than 15.