I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom. — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level. — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself. — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them. — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
“It’s because you’re different. You can’t live life by rules others give you. In that way, you and I are the same. You have… — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
“One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know… — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share
Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human. — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament. — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of… — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person. — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we're… — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond… — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
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.… — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
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… — Ayad Akhtar Copy Share Image
