Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist, nonfiction writer and short story writer. She has been called "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [that] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature".
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'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

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

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

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

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

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 ...

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 storytellin...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My greatest vanity is my skin. It is the colour of gingerbread and, thanks to my mother's genes, smooth and mostly blemish-free.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The problem with looking in the mirror is that you never know how you will feel about what you see. Sometimes, when my hormones are out of sync, I have no interest in the mirror, and if I do look I think everything is all wrong. Other times, I am qui...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It's not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That ...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into thei...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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...

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...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.

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

Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell storie...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Author Bio

  • NameChimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • DescriptionNigerian writer
  • BornSeptember 15, 1977
  • CountryNigeria
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Teacher
  • WorksPurple Hibiscus; Half Of A Yellow Sun
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program