Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.

I will be able to look back on my teen years as spent on a television set just having the biggest bunch of fun.

Every western I did and will do; I will do it for the never ending young kid inside of me.

There's something about girls and unicorns that's deep and meaningful. Something about childhood.

I still connect with original emotions. 'Night Moves' was written about 1961 or 1962 when I was in high school, and it was about what my friends and I did in that period.

The first time I saw E.T., the actual image of an alien, and he was so sweet-looking. I wanted him. I wanted E.T.

I labored for eight years thinking I was writing a book for adults that was a nostalgic look back on childhood. Then my publisher informed me I'd written a children's book.

I am a kid. I'll always be a girl at heart.

I think it is important for kids to be kids.

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Whenever people are excited about 'My Girl', I always think if I met the kids from 'The Neverending Story.' I would probably be the same way.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

I loved the idea of seeing the world through a boy's eyes.

I watched 'My Girl' as an adult pretty recently, and it's a good movie.

I loved being outside. We'd hold lightning bugs in our fingers and pretend they were diamond rings.

I like working on stories where I can explore the darker corners of childhood without illustrations but with humor.

Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.

To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that's the case with a lot of kids.

17 is the weirdest age, because you can't figure out if you want to grow up or be a child.

I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf, out of their reach.

Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and over again. Also, 'Willow' and 'The Goonies.'

It's such a potent thing, to be a kid. We grow up, and we don't want to remember how everything is so beautiful and terrifying when we're young. The older you get, the more you hope to muffle things.