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 AkhtarI think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.
Ayad AkhtarThe Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament.
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