Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes:
I would come, many years later, to understand why ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ is considered ‘an important novel’, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I am a person who believes in asking questions, in not conforming for the sake of conforming. I am deeply dissatisfied – about so many things, about injustice, about the way the world works – and in some ways, my dissatisfaction drives my storytelling.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In particular I want to talk about natural black hair, and how it’s not just hair. I mean, I’m interested in hair in sort of a very aesthetic way, just the beauty of hair, but also in a political way: what it says, what it means.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I think I’m ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian – that’s home; my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You know, I don’t think of myself as anything like a ‘global citizen’ or anything of the sort. I am just a Nigerian who’s comfortable in other places.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come – this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because don’t we want it to be mainstream?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I think it’s possible to have been a happy child, as I was, and still question and push back with regard to societal conventions.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria – it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I look young. I heard this said so often that it became irritating. I once worked as a babysitter for a woman who, the first time we met, said she didn’t want somebody in high school. I was 22. Later, I realised that in certain places being female and looking ‘young’ meant it was more difficult to be taken seriously, so I turned to make-up.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Sometimes novels are considered ‘important’ in the way medicine is – they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he – and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya – would never leave.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie