Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

No work of history can ever escape its own time...we are all influenced by what we read and what we experience.

One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.

Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it.

Our culture reflects back what is true. It doesn't always reflect it back reliably. It can distort things.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.

Judgment traps you within the limitations of your comparisons. It inhibits freedom.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices.

I just think music is so intrinsically linked with images in the culture that we live in that you'll be hard-pressed to have an experience with the music without a preconceived notion.

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that sometimes our assumptions and preconceived notions are wrong, and therefore, our interpretation of events is incorrect. This causes us to overreact, to take things personally, or to judge people unfairly.

There are a lot of people who like to think they don't have prejudices and that they're open people, and yet, we all have that in ourselves, oftentimes against people of our own race or our own gender or whatever.

He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.

I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

REVIEW, v.t. To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it./ Although in truth there's neither bone nor skin to it)/ At work upon a book, and so read out of it/ The qualities that you have first read into it.

I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

It's difficult for me to write in English as it's not my first language, but French is even worse because of my father's influence and because the comparisons that I - not even other people - would make.