The problem is that when you grow absolutely certain that all authorities are corrupt, then that would include the Palestinian authorities as well.

Living more intensely, more lovingly, with more camaraderie, that is in itself resistance.

What cinema can do is the reordering of this reality from a certain chaos or from a certain order into an aesthetic dimension.

Someone like myself is not from one place. I am in total identification with the New York, French, and Palestine experience and do not stop at the borders of identity.

I'm trying to use Palestine as a microcosm of the world, but maybe the world is a microcosm of Palestine. We're living in a moment that has lost attachment to the ideology behind boundaries.

Silence can be intimidating, sometimes provocative, sometimes a form of resistance because it dislocates.

I try to use fiction in order to reduce the potentiality of something being true. We produce our own memories so I'm not sure of truth.

I don't think there should be a Palestinian state because I don't believe in states.

People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence, what's blunt and has clarity.

I do not teach history in my films. I don't have a linear point of view or argument. What I do in my films is to live the human experience; human, whether in Nazareth or anywhere else in the world.

There are a lot of questions that come out of the silence. It is so close to the infinite.

Whatever you think you are, you are always bigger than that...

There is always space for improvement, no matter how long you've been in the business.

No matter who you are, you have a giant self.

As soon as I feel people are talking too much about my character, it's time to leave.

Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic

The evolution theory is purely the product of the imagination.

And when you pray to God regularly, irregular things happen on a regular basis.

In my soul, I am free.

Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.

I went to an historically black college where we're always told that there's limitation. And so I'm happy to represent for black colleges.