If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.
Ayad AkhtarI don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.
Ayad AkhtarI think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.
Ayad AkhtarHere'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 AkhtarI 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 AkhtarI 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