In fact I didn't think about fear much at the time. I felt angry about everything that was happening around me: the violence of the dictatorship and the violence of society.

Knowledge and imagination are the life buoy and the extra lung for breathing outside the walls of a tainted reality.

I'm talking about the essence of humanity. Hope is mixed into the blood of every human being, everywhere and in every time.

It's ridiculous and painful to use the Arabic of an Iraqi poet who lived centuries ago to describe what we in Iraq are suffering today.

I studied at the Academy during the years of economic sanctions. Life was almost dead because the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the civilized world were so strict.

One of the Baathists once told me, "If you're not careful, I'll have you put away," and those words meant death.

We in Iraq have not descended from another planet. Just as people in many other countries have gotten over the tragedy of war, Iraq will get over its ordeal.

The trail of "secret migration" was a shock to me. I knew a little about the difficulties, just bits of news in the media.

I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

You learn something from the classics but your feelings and your imagination operate in the domain of the colloquial. We need to think seriously about reforming the Arabic that we use today.

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation

We should not let a day go by without thanking God for His mercy and grace to us in Jesus Christ.

When you’re young, you wish for things in the future, but when you grow old … you wish for things from the past

The truth isn't always beauty but the hunger for it is.

Enough is so vast a sweetness I suppose it never occurs.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

I love clothes, but I don't know what to put on myself, let alone others. I have a lot of help getting dressed.

Fairy tales have a hidden power, and their appeal never ends. They're the best way to get messages across.

Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.

I was sorry to lose it, and if you make me another one, I promise not to get taken captive by bandits and have to use it to save my life.