I always say show me a storyteller who doesn't embellish, and I'll show you a bad one. Rabih Alameddine More Quotes by Rabih Alameddine More Quotes From Rabih Alameddine I'm surprised how often I'm asked about being a man with a woman narrator. I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. It's been done forever, but we seem to forget that. The whole notion of "write what you know" is not just boring, but wrong. Lately it seems like every novel has to be a memoir. I'm a boring person, but I'm a writer with a relatively vivid imagination. And when people ask me about how I find the voice of a woman, I tell them that my life is run by women. Rabih Alameddine writingrunningmen The whole world is going insane right now. We, too, have our own problems. The president of Lebanon is an arch-menace. But I think, as horrid as he is - and he is absolutely insane - he's still more sane than Trump, so that tells me a lot. Rabih Alameddine insanepresidentthinking For someone like me and my generation, you had to speak French to be sophisticated, you had to be lighter-skinned. Rabih Alameddine sophisticatedspeak You look at the Koran or the Bible, they all tell the same stories. You see them as the stories of the Middle East. The stories reflect who these people were in the Middle East, and this is where Western culture came from. All our literature is basically influenced by these great myths. So I'm fascinated by it. You could almost say I'm obsessed with it. But if you're asking about the effect of religion on my life - almost everything I do is opposed to the practice of religion. Rabih Alameddine literatureculturepeople I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we grew up with. Both on a personal level and a collective level. Rabih Alameddine atheist If I were to pray in Arabic, I'd pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I'd pray to God. Rabih Alameddine allahprayenglishgod A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona. Rabih Alameddine whateveralwaysphoenixhistory No one needs to be reminded of racism in soccer: the xenophobia, the nativism and, yes, nationalism. Rabih Alameddine yesnationalismracismsoccer My father and I rarely saw eye to eye when I was growing up. We saw the world differently. It was only when we were both adults that we were able to share spectacles. However, football, and particularly the World Cup, was when we, enemy combatants, could traverse trenches and be together. Rabih Alameddine togetherfootballfatherworld All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague. Rabih Alameddine wearwordslanguagewish Now I love hoops. I'm a diehard UCLA fan, have been since my freshman year. But basketball is the '1812 Overture.' Pomp and circumstance, fireworks and cannons, lots and lots of fun, and in the end, still Tchaikovsky. Rabih Alameddine endbasketballfunlove I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic. Rabih Alameddine greatupsetliteraturecute I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught. Rabih Alameddine readwerebecausetaught In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English. Rabih Alameddine englishlebanonspeakschool There are over 1 million refugees in Lebanon, a country of 4 million people. How do we solve that? I have no idea. What's going on, I really don't know. Rabih Alameddine howknowcountrypeople In Lebanon, there are completely different opinions and values in one country in terms of religion, modernity, tradition, East and West - which allows for a kind of intellectual development not available anywhere else. Rabih Alameddine valuestraditioncountryreligion I can easily hold two opposing beliefs at the same time without any problem, which I find - well, mind-expanding, really. Rabih Alameddine findi-canproblemtime 'Harat' is actually - it's a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from 'the mapmaker,' somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit. Rabih Alameddine mapsomebodylittlewho We seem, particularly over here in the West and in America in particular, to have forgotten that we are, in large measures, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Rabih Alameddine overstorytellamerica I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read. Rabih Alameddine greatmeyouwar
