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.

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.

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.

Thank God you have got a Father that can be angry, but that loves you as much when He is angry as when He smiles upon you.

Our imagination is dictated by who we are. (198)

Maybe before you start flirting with boys and kissing boys and trying to date boys, you should know who you are and where you stand.

Temptations are a file which rub off much of the rust of our self-confidence.

Never the grave gives back what it has won!

New York is essentially national in interest, position, pursuits. No one thinks of the place as belonging to a particular state, but to the United States.

I've committed adultery in my heart.

For a country boy, poor as I was, whose constant worry was to be able to have enough to eat, the Army guaranteed one's survival.

I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.