Male female slave or free; peaceful or disorderly; maybe you and he will not agree; but you need him to show you new ways to see.

Once you tie anger and ego together then you're a monster, at least a latent one. So you have to be able to separate those things before you are going to be able to do anything useful with your anger.

Almost all the military personnel were wearing sunglasses. No Iraqis wear sunglasses. They really want to see your eyes. So immediately they can't trust the Americans.

Everything that makes a society run is broken in Iraq. The only real structure is the people's own sense of themselves as Iraqis, which was very strong. They're a proud people, and they trace their historic roots way, way back.

Little round planet in a big universe, sometimes it looks blessed, sometimes it looks cursed. Depends what you look at obviously, but even more it depends on the way that you see.

Politics is a part of life and art is about life. It doesn't mean that all the art has to be about politics - in fact, heaven forbid. But politics is a totally legitimate area of focus for any art, whether it's painting or songwriting or anything else, as much as sex is, as much as spirituality is, as much as any other behavior of people is.

A number of Iraqis told us they had welcomed the U.S. forces as liberators initially but in the intervening months, they had come to feel that they had swapped one oppressive regime for another. The Iraqis did exchange one oppression for a lighter kind, in some ways.