We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Chris Abani Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
Every successful artist comes from a family – parents or siblings or both – who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the treacherous and difficult path of the artist.
Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn’t need that last minute research before writing?
There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe’s work. We are either resisting him – stylistically, politically, or culturally – or we are writing toward him.
Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is.
It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It’s a complicated relationship.
I love essays, but they’re not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.
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.
Sometimes I feel very alone. I am a bit of a nomad. Many people in sort of emerging countries, emerging economies, find themselves displaced. So there is that sense, and so I’m part of a whole, I think, group of displaced people.
That women are mysterious and unknowable is something every young man grows up believing. Men, on the other hand, never think of themselves as mysterious or confusing, and we are often at a loss as to why women want to figure us out.
My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the ’50s.
My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us.
The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.
The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god.
African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don’t care anymore. I’m more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves – how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.
