Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Stories Quotations

Stories matter. Many stories matter.

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

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.'

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.

Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.