Rabih Alameddine Quotes
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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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When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.
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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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A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.
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Close friends consider me a literary snob.
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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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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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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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The relationship between France and its 'foreign' players - blacks and North African Arabs - has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.
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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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For me, soccer was a dance.
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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 1982, Algeria made their first appearance at the World Cup. I believe it was the first Arab country to do so.
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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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The reasons why a player is better on one club than on another are many. I certainly am not an expert and can't explain.
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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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As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.
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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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When I was younger, I used to find stories about divas charming. Not much anymore.
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I know many sports fans that don't enjoy soccer. The argument is that there's no action, not enough of it.
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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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If you want to know whether soccer is big in America, pick a weekend, go to any park in the land, and pay attention. We're there. We've always been.
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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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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.