Latest Chris Abani Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Love is at once the most creative and yet simultaneously destructive force in the world, and thus, in our lives. And I don't mean the Hallmark sentimental type of love, although that is part of it. But a deeper obligation that we have to each other: the obligation to reflect our humanness at each other, to reflect back the things others show us and we, them.

  Chris Abani

  Mean, Love Is, Creative

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I've seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology.

  Chris Abani

  Powerful, Real, War

  "The Rumpus Interview With Chris Abani". Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.

  Chris Abani

  Character, Thinking, People

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you.

  Chris Abani

  Lenses, Want, Cognitive Dissonance

  "The Rumpus Interview With Chris Abani". Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

  Chris Abani

  Thinking, Cities, Forests

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• All power within the microcosm of my world was held and wielded by people who look like me. Plus, I think Nigerians all have this sense that they are better than everyone, including white people. So I have the privilege of a certain distance. It may just be that. So in a sense, I can't claim that as any ability that I have, simply a matter of circumstance.

  Chris Abani

  Distance, Thinking, White

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• If you encounter a human shadow burned permanently into the concrete in Hiroshima, you realize that this is the trace of a very ordinary person now elevated into the emblematic. Time, shame, complicity, or discomfort are the only things that make us pretend History is impersonal or far removed from the power and consequences of our every lived moment.

  Chris Abani

  Shadow, Encounters, Ordinary

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.

  Chris Abani

  Fun, Book, Character

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

  Chris Abani

  Holocaust, Historical, Ordinary

  "The Rumpus Interview With Chris Abani". Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center.

  Chris Abani

  Real, Reading, Character

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• All my characters exist in risk, in the places we are either too afraid to go to, or have enough privilege not to have to, but whatever the reason, these characters I fashion go before us and come back transformed for us. For me, at least.

  Chris Abani

  Fashion, Character, Risk

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

  Chris Abani

  Art, Reality, Risk

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• Narrative is a very feeble weapon in the face of human darkness and yet it's all we have. That we have to hang the transformation and survival of our species on the journey and transformation of one singular person so far outside of what we expect they can do.

  Chris Abani

  Journey, Darkness, Survival

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

  Chris Abani

  Book, Fiction, Narrative

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• The greatest thing about form and convention is that it saves you from having to reinvent the wheel. Now, whether you mount the wheel to a horse carriage or a Formula One racing car, make it plain or give it spinning rims, those are all craft decisions. But the fact of the wheel remains: it will turn if you set it down. That's what I mean about the beauty of the gifts genre can offer.

  Chris Abani

  Horse, Mean, Giving

  "The Rumpus Interview With Chris Abani". Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• Fiction is more dangerous than nonfiction because it can seduce better. I think we all know this, know that deeper truths can be approached in fiction than in fact. There are risks for the reader, because after reading certain books you find you have changed irreversibly. There are risks for writers: in China, now, and Ethiopia and other countries right now, writers face real persecution.

  Chris Abani

  Country, Real, Book

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

• Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice.

  Chris Abani

  Fire, Self, Two

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.