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.

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.

Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the other who would drag us all into the eternal light

I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.

His blank face communicated an emptiness that could never be filled"- Frank Balenger

Love exalts because it is exalted.

The worst enemy women have is in the pulpit.

In Hawaii, there are 50-year-old grandfathers, because they got married so early.

It is satisfying for the descendant of a dissident refugee from Elizabeth I to present his credentials to Elizabeth II.

I could be a comedian. I could be a gangster. I could play all of those parts, even for the first time... I'm versatile.

Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women.

I think we can work through a lot of political and international problems, but what really frightens me is what's happening environmentally.