Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one’s wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures...

Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take...

No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.” (p. 22)

By remaining constrained in one’s environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which...

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across–each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip–is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom,...

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

He may be my half brother, but we’re not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.” (p. 70)

In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather’s face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory’s eyes have cataracts.” (p. 12)

Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.

…What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he...

And where do you think you are?

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I’m not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro’s skin. But I can’t relate to...

I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in...

Passion was the antithesis of morality.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

Me? I was lost for long time. I didn’t make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school […]. I...

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are...

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.

I realised when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one.

Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don’t rattle your windows and...

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to...

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren’t in it. And after all, they had...

How can she tell the difference between freedom and unburdening?

She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.