Everything that happens in Iraq affects countries outside.

Turkey is saying that it wants to preserve Sunni dominance in Mosul. Obviously, there, the Kurds, the Shia, the Iraqi government have their own agendas.

There are sort of Kurdish districts there in Mosul, or there used to be, but the Kurds mostly fled or were driven out. The same is true of the Christians.

A defeat for ISIS in Iraq will be defeat for ISIS in Syria.

Mosul stands rally at a sort of juncture of sectarian and ethnic differences.

You know, if you want to meet a lot of Iraqi leaders, the best places are the hotels in Amman or in London. In general the government here is amazingly unpopular.

I stared at him (Dionysus). "You're...you're married? But I thought you got in trouble for chasing a wood nymph-

Teach the ignorant. Study the wise. Avoid the foolish. Embrace the enlightened.

Reality is reality when it exists inside and outside the mind.

I will see my father in every anger.

We don't object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance.

I don't like having noise swirling around me. Loud noises bother me, so I try to stick to the outside of a room.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

Cook more often. Don't study; just cook.

Bring me then the plant that points to those bright Lucidites swirling up from the earth, and life itself exhaling that central breath! Bring me the sunflower crazed with the love of light.

Work always gives me an opportunity to grow as an artist and a person.