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We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Time
Perfect
Beings
Daughters
Girl
Husband
Sons
Cannot
Boys
Girlfriend
Back
Bring
Sexual
Right
Courses
Son
Mind
Course
Expect
Boyfriends
Way
Teach
Daughter
Girlfriends
Men
Knowing
Girls
Forbid

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Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
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The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
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I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America
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Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
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This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
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The idea that sex is something a woman gives a man, and she loses something when she does that, which again for me is nonsense. I want us to raise girls differently where boys and girls start to see sexuality as something that they own, rather than something that a boy takes from a girl.
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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.
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Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
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If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
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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.'
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Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
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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.
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The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.
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The only reason race matters is because of racism.
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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.
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I was stained by failure.
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If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.
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Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
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Culture does not make people - people make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, we must make it our culture. [...] A feminist is a man or a woman who says, 'yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it. We must do better.'
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I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.
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