Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

For me, storytelling is all about how we learn about each other. I'm so curious about people, what makes them tick, why they are who they are, and how we all relate to each other, despite the fact that we may not think that we do.

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.'

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

I love observing people. Each face tells so many stories. It lets me understand emotions, and that, in turn, helps me apply my skills as an actor.

I think I always gravitated more toward psychological studies and how people behave in a variety of circumstances. Most of the stories that I tell tend to feature women who get caught up in certain situations - end up in some calamity or other.

Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics... The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

What's more interesting are the dynamics between people that involve hypocrisy or ignoring each other. That's what I want to write about. I like to make people uncomfortable because it's something we should be uncomfortable about.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

People behave more on the basis of how they feel than how they think; unless there are good feelings between people, it is almost impossible to reason intelligently.

I think I have learned to really get out of the mathematical side of myself that looks at story and story structure and go with, "Okay, well, what would people do in real life?"

I think that people who can't believe in faeries aren't worth knowing. I just think that alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in faeries.

When it comes to people -- don't write about who you know; but what you know of human nature.

When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.

It's once I discover the people inside that the story really gets going, and then the formal invention becomes less important. It's just the way in; it's the door; and then what's behind it is always some kind of people, which I think probably makes me more in the tradition of realistic fiction because that's usually what I'm interested in, the people.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all.

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

Neil [Gaiman, creator of the comic Sandman, featuring the Amos-based character Delirium] believes that faeries have gone beyond cool. They've transcended cool. I just think alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in faeries. I'm sure I'll start thinking now about all the people I know who don't believe, that I quite like. We can still go have a pint. Not the Chardonnay, though.

Before the Olympics, there's always been a part of me that's wanted to write a book about Women's cycling because there isn't one out there and I think there's a lot to be said.

I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.

I don't think comic timing is the same as music timing, but I definitely find that I've learned from just writing in general that songs can be narrative without having a story.

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.