I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing.

I wanted to explore expectations we have of people - what a woman should be, what a man should be. And if they don't meet our own interpretation of who they should be because of their gender, their background, their ethnic group, we then come to conclusions about them that are not accurate.

I'd always been interested in Nigeria's past.

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.

You cannot go out and say, oh, I am going to raise all this spending, but it's not going to cost anybody any money.

We never had a billionaire brand in music; the closest thing we had was Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson sold 750 million records. I think we're gonna set the tone for other youngsters to make more money and see that a billion dollars can be accomplished.

As long as women are in the work force making their own money and decisions, men are going to have to realize that this way of life is here to stay - because it takes two incomes to make it and more now. The sooner you address your style of saving and spending with your mate the better off your relationship will be.

The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.