Quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.

I think people are frightened of saying what they think, and I think that's a bad thing for society.

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

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

I think the history of western feminism is one that is fraught with racism, and I think it's important to acknowledge that and, at the same time, to say that feminism is not the western invention, that my great-grandmother in what is now south-western Nigeria is feminist.

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 quite pleased with what I see.

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

When I go back home now, when I go back to Nigeria now, I get off the plane in Lagos and I just don't think of race. I get on the plane and arrive in Atlanta, and immediately I'm aware of race.

I don't think it's a good thing to talk about women's issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don't think that's true.

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

I think white women need to wake up and say, 'Not all women are white,' three times in front of the mirror.

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.

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

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'.

I look young. I heard this said so often that it became irritating. I once worked as a babysitter for a woman who, the first time we met, said she didn't want somebody in high school. I was 22. Later, I realised that in certain places being female and looking 'young' meant it was more difficult to be taken seriously, so I turned to make-up.

Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not 'naturally' in charge as men.

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.

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in "real" African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.

People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It's exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.

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.

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 storytelling.

Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.

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.'