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, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.
Rabih AlameddineI 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.
Rabih AlameddineIs life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they donโt bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they donโt rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?
Rabih AlameddineBy 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, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.
Rabih AlameddineThere are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.
Rabih AlameddineMe? I was lost for long time. I didnโt make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school [โฆ]. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. [โฆ]. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.
Rabih AlameddineI need to have one foot inside and one foot outside a culture to be able to write about it. For example, I couldn't write about the gay culture if I were wholly inside or outside of it. Finding that distance is always interesting. I jokingly say that when I'm in America, I write about Beirut, and when I'm in Beirut, I write about America. A lot of my friends in Beirut think I'm more American than Lebanese. Here, my friends think of me more as Lebanese.
Rabih Alameddine