Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.
The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, spanned four World Cups. It would have been a more symmetrical five had the Lebanese begun in 1974, but you know, we're Mediterranean, and timing isn't our forte.
I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.
I couldn't tell the truth if my life depended on it.
'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.
No one needs to be reminded of racism in soccer: the xenophobia, the nativism and, yes, nationalism.
I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.
Nobody ever calls me a soccer-playing writer, even though I play soccer and it's part of who I am.
I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.
A team without hope fizzles: no flameout, no fire.
English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.
I oscillate between being cynical and being naive on a regular basis. I always think that not much shocks me until something much too obvious does.
I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.
In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.
In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.
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.
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.
I can easily hold two opposing beliefs at the same time without any problem, which I find - well, mind-expanding, really.
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.
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.
