104 Quotes by Chris Abani
- Author Chris Abani
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My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.
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Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
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I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.
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The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.
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My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.
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In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.
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I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.
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Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?
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I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
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