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The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

- Chris Abani
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Author:
Chris Abani
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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.

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is.

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.

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.

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.

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.

My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s.

Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

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The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.