Every great story deserves a great ending
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Human life is fiction's only theme.
One place understood helps us understand all places better
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.
I just became a vegetable for three months. I couldn't talk to people. I was very ill and that was part of the reason I left college.
There is something very consistent about governance in the Arab world. Among the Arab countries today in which there is a modicum of internal stability, each is controlled by an Arafat-type figure - an anti-democratic strongman who is able to crush all challenges to his authority. Likewise, among those Arab countries that aren't ruled by a despot, the political dynamic is also consistent: In Lebanon, Iraq, and now Gaza, sectarian violence is the dominant form of political expression.
Earthworms will dance
I'm a London fanatic. That's my city. I love being from there, you don't appreciate it until you go out.