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.
Ayad AkhtarIf you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.
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 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 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 think of myself as a narrative artist. I don't think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of those modalities of processing and experiencing narrative are obviously very different, and I'm not sure that I prefer any one to the other. I think the novel gives you the opportunity to have a kind of interiority that you can't have in the theater, which is pure exteriority.
Ayad Akhtar