Dinaw Mengestu

You see, at the beginning we weren't fighters. We weren't yellers or throwers, even if we eventually came to be. It would…

— Dinaw Mengestu

I told my parents I was going to be a doctor and then a lawyer, but I never believed it and never…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“You will never disappear," I said. "Even if it may feel like you have at some point. We're going to remain a…

— Dinaw Mengestu

The fact that I have always been deeply invested in politics, and African politics in particular, inevitably played a role in my…

— Dinaw Mengestu

Writers, especially those of us with roots in other countries, are rarely left to ourselves. We are asked to declare our allegiances,…

— Dinaw Mengestu

Personally, its a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“If the last thing a man has to hold on to is his sense of pride and accompanying dignity, then more likely…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“Have you seen a hungry man with a gun? Of course not. Such things don't exist. It's like saying, have you ever…

— Dinaw Mengestu

There are those who wake up each morning to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake up…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“She always thought Americans were too territorial. 'All those fences and flags,' she had once said, seeing very little difference between the…

— Dinaw Mengestu

Ethnic divisions can definitely be exacerbated by a lack of natural resources, but those tensions become violent when people manipulate them for…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“I remember another aphorism of my father's, one that he used to say whenever we passed someone pissing openly in the street:…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“Through them, the story becomes an argument for a better way of seeing, which has always struck me as being one of…

— Dinaw Mengestu

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say…

— Dinaw Mengestu

I had lost too much of the heart and all the faith needed to stay afloat in a job where every human…

— Dinaw Mengestu

At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“In fact, there is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“We would meet outside the same wine bar we had gone to on our first date, and from there we would wander…

— Dinaw Mengestu

I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and…

— Dinaw Mengestu

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to…

— Dinaw Mengestu

When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“Don't worry', he said. I almost laughed when he said that. Don't worry. It's only the people who've never had to worry…

— Dinaw Mengestu

“Ghosts are common to the life of any child:mine just happened to come to dinner more often than most”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“Perhaps she thought, this was the way everything in America actually was- all smoke and mirrors, with only illusions of grandeur.”

— Dinaw Mengestu