To choose to write is to reject silence. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie More Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie More Quotes From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet 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 love-of-my-life unique morning At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading blue character I think it's important to humanize history; fiction can help us remember. A lot of books I've read in the past have been so much more important than textbooks - there is an emotional connection with one particular person. I'm very much of a research-is-important type of fiction writer, even for contemporary fiction. I wrote about blogs in America and I've never blogged. But I read many, many blogs - usually about feminist things, or about race, or about hair. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie emotional book past Honesty. And I just really think there's a fundamental friendship that needs to exist, whether it's a lover, whether it's a sister...there's just this connection both people need to be effortlessly themselves. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie honesty people thinking My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you! Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie character people thinking Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie partnership married said 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 writing believe art I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie columbia maryland my-time There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts--it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved--but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie legs people world If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie home writing school 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 egypt president school I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie real stories writing I have my father's lopsided mouth. When I smile, my lips slope to one side. My doctor sister calls it my cerebral palsy mouth. I am very much a daddy's girl, and even though I would rather my smile wasn't crooked, there is something moving for me about having a mouth exactly like my father's. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie girl father moving There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie dissonance nigeria strange Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sweat hair running 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 writing war profound How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stranger easy lying Stories matter. Many stories matter. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie matter stories 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 writing book thinking ...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie want-me want happens
