Rabih Alameddine Quotes
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I couldn't tell the truth if my life depended on it.
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In Lebanon, there are completely different opinions and values in one country in terms of religion, modernity, tradition, East and West - which allows for a kind of intellectual development not available anywhere else.
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There are over 1 million refugees in Lebanon, a country of 4 million people. How do we solve that? I have no idea. What's going on, I really don't know.
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If I were to pray in Arabic, I'd pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I'd pray to God.
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When I was younger, I used to find stories about divas charming. Not much anymore.
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English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.
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In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.
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For me, soccer was a dance.
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Close friends consider me a literary snob.
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When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.
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'Harat' is actually - it's a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from 'the mapmaker,' somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit.
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I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.
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I loved problems on paper, and I was good at math, but I was a mechanical engineer, and I never understood - or cared to - how a car worked.
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I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.
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If you go through any culture that has had wars, go to the bomb shelters, and you'll hear some amazing stories. Yes, it's a necessary thing that we actually both distract ourselves and it's a way to bond.
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A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.
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The relationship between France and its 'foreign' players - blacks and North African Arabs - has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.
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Soccer is the most widely played sport in the U.S.
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All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.
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I always say show me a storyteller who doesn't embellish, and I'll show you a bad one.
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In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.
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Nobody ever calls me a soccer-playing writer, even though I play soccer and it's part of who I am.
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I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.
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My father loved Brazilian football, a diehard follower, so of course, he hated Germany and always rooted against them, always.