Chris Abani Quotes

Fairy tales are with us day in and day out, not just in commercials, but references in the theater, movies, museums, schools, etc.

Television wasn't prestigious.

Media, the plural of mediocrity.

And it's not only films, I'm pretty unaware of anything that's going on in popular culture right now.

Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.

I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

Pop culture is like our subconscious.

The image of one country and its people amongst peoples of another country is largely created and sustained by the media.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

The American might be defined as a newspaper-reading animal.

The media, and how we're taught to read it, has a huge impact on who we become as people.

When you look at the media and television, and all this Hollywood stuff, you just judge people.

I've travelled a lot, but I am essentially American. All my input has been American.

I think in particularly with young kids who don't have a lot of positive influences, pop culture almost becomes a larger part of that self-discovery and how you define yourself.

This notion that Americans have. . . that they don't have to do anything other than be American in order to lead - that's very pervasive in the culture, it goes very deep into how they see themselves here.

Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

No matter how much people want to pretend that they're embarrassed by it, that they don't watch it, everybody knows about it. It's truly, I believe, one of the only art forms that America has actually given to the world, besides jazz and comic books.

Canadians and Americans may look alike, but the contents of their heads are quite different. Americans experience themselves, individually, as small toads in the biggest and most powerful puddle in the world. Their sense of power comes from identifying with the puddle. Canadians as individuals may have more power within the puddle, since there are fewer toads in it; it's the puddle that's seen as powerless.

Hallelujah! Amen! Christianity is so inherent in western story-telling, you can't really get around it. But it wasn't something that drew me to it more or less.

Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior.

I was confident about America and the idea that in America people can become American without masking their ethnic identity.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

My ambition was always to be a perfect picture of an American.

Worst music ever sells millions. The worst music with the shittiest lyrics. The fact is that they pay radio stations to put it on the radio, then you've heard it a million times when you're driving from your shitty job to your shitty house. It's indoctrination, it's sad.