Quote

Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Novel
Asks
Thing
People

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Image
...there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
The only reason race matters is because of racism.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
You can have ambition But not too much You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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 their social worlds.'
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I don't believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
You deserve to take up space.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie