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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 in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.

Ayad Akhtar

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Ayad Akhtar
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: October 28
Actor
Playwright
Screenwriter
Staten Island
New York City
Way
Making
Expression
World
Understand
Industry
Constraints
Feelings
Inside
Expectation
Art
Longer
Engagement
Self
Started
Respond
Thing
Feeling
Avoid
Work
Creative
Excited
Kind
Audience
Expectations

More quotes by Ayad Akhtar

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I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.
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I've always felt a connection to kids who go to church. I think I'm fundamentally a religiously oriented and religiously minded person. It's very easy for me to communicate with people who have that same grounding, that same vocabulary or modality of thinking and expressing themselves.
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I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.
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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.
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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.
Ayad Akhtar
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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.
Ayad Akhtar
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I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.
Ayad Akhtar
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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
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I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be.
Ayad Akhtar
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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.
Ayad Akhtar
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The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.
Ayad Akhtar
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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
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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.
Ayad Akhtar
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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
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I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.
Ayad Akhtar