Ayad Akhtar

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

— Ayad Akhtar

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to…

— Ayad Akhtar

“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.…

— Ayad Akhtar

“One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think,…

— Ayad Akhtar

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.

— Ayad Akhtar

The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the…

— Ayad Akhtar

I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the…

— Ayad Akhtar

I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

— Ayad Akhtar

Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and…

— Ayad Akhtar

I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started…

— Ayad Akhtar

Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention…

— Ayad Akhtar

I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the…

— Ayad Akhtar

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the…

— Ayad Akhtar

I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of…

— Ayad Akhtar

If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do…

— Ayad Akhtar

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I…

— Ayad Akhtar

“Sometimes I thought of Him as a cloud in the sky;... sometimes as simply an enormous white light. Whatever the image, I…

— Ayad Akhtar

I think of myself as a narrative artist. I don't think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of…

— Ayad Akhtar

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.

— Ayad Akhtar

I think there is a lot of continuity between the Jewish and the Islamic traditions. We know this historically, though people don't…

— Ayad Akhtar

I feel like that religions generally ask the biggest questions. They may not always have the best answers, but they're the zone…

— Ayad Akhtar

I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own…

— Ayad Akhtar

I've always felt a connection to kids who go to church. I think I'm fundamentally a religiously oriented and religiously minded person.…

— Ayad Akhtar

The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.

— Ayad Akhtar

I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological…

— Ayad Akhtar