Amin Maalouf Quotes
During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.
Quotes to Explore
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I spend an extraordinary amount of time in my car, so I can justify the expense. That's the only extravagance in my life - it's my car.
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Seeing people who are actually reading your book and listening to the wide variety of reactions they have to it, is really special.
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I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.
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Through love one acquires renunciation and discrimination naturally.
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Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.
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Any organization or any individual that targets civilians and kills them for political agenda is a terrorist organization.
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It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
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If you calculate 15 minutes a day to shave, that is 5,000 minutes a year spent shaving.
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I live in a bus and go from place to place and sometimes feel very detached from what's going on.
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No person is just one particular emotion.
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A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
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No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual.
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The problem with forbearance is that it always looks like a good thing to do until it stops working.
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I write about real people in disguise. If anything, my characters are toned down-the truth is much more bizarre.
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If there is a pattern, it will come back - maybe in Russia more than anywhere else, because it has collapsed so many times. Maybe less so here in the States, because here the society is so young.
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I've always tried to be fair, even-handed, not an advocate for any group.
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The Internet's like one big bathroom wall with a lot of people who anonymously can say really mean things. It's fine, I believe in freedom of speech and I think people should think what they want, but I don't care to hear it.
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One thing I'm doing on the new Titanic recording is actually bringing in different acoustic spaces.
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Don't let anyone turn you into a slave. You're a slave if you let the media tell you that sports and entertainment are more important than developing your brain.
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America is much better than the leadership we have in Washington.
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We all have heard it claimed that 13 is an 'unlucky number.' Indeed, there are many hotels in America that for this very reason claim not to have a 13th floor, in the sense that there is no button bearing the label '13' in their elevators (I recently stayed in one in New York, in fact).
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Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.
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Well, that's what life is - this collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments. We just need to pay attention to them all. Wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is.
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During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.
