A Quote by Uwem Akpan

I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet. — © Uwem Akpan
I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.
While I was still going to embrace social media, I knew I had to do things that nobody else was doing. I decided I had to meet as many people as I could - face to face. While most artists would email galleries, I would show up in the lobby. Instead of liking an art show or exhibition, I would go there and meet everyone. And while most would send a magazine a press kit, I go and meet the editor. This notion of face to face contact became my mantra.
I wish every American had an opportunity to sit down, to go to a base, to meet with families, to meet with service members, to sit down with our veterans - because we would think differently about our challenges as individuals.
Oh, I think Neymar would be a nice guy I'd like to meet. Messi, too. Cristiano Ronaldo. I think they are guys that their lives would encourage me. They would be nice people to meet and know more about their stories, to evolve and grow more with their stories. I think it would be cool to meet them.
Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.
I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction rather than making the blanket assumption that all commercial fiction is unworthy.
I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.
Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.
I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.
THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
I would like to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. I think it would be great to sit in a room with him...and try to make peace.
Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different
When they're watching musicals, I've heard people say, 'That's not realistic! Why would they just start singing?' But, I think they can believe it if they try! I mean, science fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, but people allow themselves to sit back and enjoy it anyway.
I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.
I think the best research is people you meet and things that they say, rather than second hand accounts of something. I think when you meet someone and talk to them, then you get the real thing and that's what you can use. That's the material you can actually put on the page.
Nixon would like to consign us to to the level of the most backward countries in the whole Middle East. Why lower us to the standard of the Saudis rather than raising the Saudis to meet us?
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!