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 am what I am and I'm a horrible liar. I can't do it. I'm just very candid.
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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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Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.
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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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Quiet is the new loud.
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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 am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.
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I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.
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The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
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I had no real education because I was in and out of schools so I decided that I would completely change my look, change my image, change my name and move to New York.
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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.
