"I think science fiction and Blackness are intrinsically linked... People came from somewhere else, and they kidnapped you, and took you to somewhere else, and you became another people. So that’s why people say that people in the African diaspora really connect to science fiction."

"He gasped at the sight of the black dots outside his window, believing his nightmares real, and saw they weren’t lice, but ICO. Loads. Crawling through gardens. Leant against warped, wind-blown fences. Lining the alleyway that ran like a spine between garden rows. Gathered in a bunched fist by the gate that led to Mr Sharmake’s garden..."

"...I could write books about people who live in this particular locality for the rest of my life. Because I don’t think there are richer lives elsewhere. I think you’ve got everything here – heartbreak, happiness, euphoria, alienation and depression."

"Through all this was a real love of language and what you can do with it. It fascinates me how I can interrogate language, how I can stretch it and push it and what I can do with it. Particularly imagery. A lot of my stories start with images..."

"The challenge, I think, is not to reduce this to a trope—but to attempt to create work that radically refigures the ways we’ve conceived of the relationship between humankind and the environment..."

"Some of my research involved sitting beside an eight-hundred-year old oak tree for many hours and in many weathers..."

"What I think this teaches us is that distraction, gossip, fragments of experience, digressions and byways are the makings of fiction..."

"Every time I answer a question I glance out the window to check the snow, and I see that there's exactly the same amount, always. I believe that special employees of the town are hired to work through the night, spreading snow so that it remains at the same height for six months."

"You can look at your story, test every seam of its world, and see that you've made a beautiful thing."

"Stories are a basic human need. Not in the sense that food is, we don't need them to keep our hearts beating. But in the sense that as long as our hearts are beating we need to hear them, and there will be people called upon to make them."

"Like those compressed japanese paper flowers you drop into a glass of water and watch unfurl and bloom."

"The story occupies that place between waking and dreaming, which gives it an especially hypnotic presence..."

"A true plainness resonates differently from the kind of language that draws attention to itself..."

"A resonant short story is a beautiful and exciting thing..."