Ayad Akhtar Quotes
I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.
If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.
Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.
I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.
I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.
I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.
I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.
The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament.
In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.
I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of life, and those are an important part of my childhood and my identity.
I feel like that religions generally ask the biggest questions. They may not always have the best answers, but they're the zone of human activity that regularly asks the biggest questions.
Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.
I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.