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

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 stories about them.

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

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

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I have been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.

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 their social worlds.'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

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 games played with an exotic summer friend.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I find that women... deal with immigration differently. And I'm interested in that.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

'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

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nobody just leaves medical school, especially given it's fiercely competitive to get in. But I had a sister who was a doctor, another who was a pharmacist, a brother who was an engineer. So my parents already had sensible children who would be able to make an actual living, and I think they felt comfortable sacrificing their one strange child.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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 stories about them.

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

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

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

I have been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.

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.'

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

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.

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

I find that women... deal with immigration differently. And I'm interested in that.

I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S.

'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.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.

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?