Ayad Akhtar

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

I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level. ”

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. ”

I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be. ”

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. ”

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human. ”

I feel like that religions generally ask the biggest questions. They may not always have the best answers, but they're the zone of human activity that regularly asks the biggest questions. ”

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. ”

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. ”