21 Quotes by Ayad Akhtar

The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.

[A]t the end of the day, art's capacity to change the world is profoundly limited. But what it can do is change the way we see things individually.

My father first meet Donald Trump in the early ‘90s, when they were both in their midforties—my father the elder by a year—and as each was coming out from under virtual financial ruin.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

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.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

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.

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.

I 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.