Quotes by Dinaw Mengestu

About Dinaw Mengestu:

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American novelist and writer. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda. His writing has also appeared in Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is Lannan Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University. Since his first book was published in 2007, he has received numerous literary awards, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There are those who wake up each morning to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake up only because we have to. We live in the shadow of every neighborhood. We own little corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little...

Dinaw Mengestu

We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.

Dinaw Mengestu

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things...

Dinaw Mengestu

Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this bo...

Dinaw Mengestu

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border of my life and friendships. I learned quickly how to stand alone.

Dinaw Mengestu

When I was growing up, Forest Park was full of integrated families. It was amazing. One my best friends was Vietnamese. Another one was half-Mexican, half-black. Another one was from Colombia. Another one was born in the U.S., but his mom was from Ge...

Dinaw Mengestu

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those stra...

Dinaw Mengestu

When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

Dinaw Mengestu

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

Dinaw Mengestu

Personally, it's a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.

Dinaw Mengestu

In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.

Dinaw Mengestu

History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

Dinaw Mengestu

As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.

Dinaw Mengestu

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me ...

Dinaw Mengestu

As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it.

Dinaw Mengestu

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Dinaw Mengestu

It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one pl...

Dinaw Mengestu

When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

Dinaw Mengestu

I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.

Dinaw Mengestu

'The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears' is very much about America - it just happens to have African and Ethiopian characters, and in fact, it happens to have more characters who are not Ethiopian than who are.

Dinaw Mengestu

Author Bio

  • NameDinaw Mengestu
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • Born1978
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program