As a woman, you don't have really much freedom of choice in the Middle East - very often, by the time they are 13 or 14, girls get married.

My whole childhood was about being in the garden. It wasn't really a religious place to me. The love I felt there... was in contradiction with what I saw in the streets. It was a different world.

I think the first time I really felt that I was Palestinian was a time when I was trying to go back to school with my father at night and there was a curfew for Palestinians. My father said, "I will walk first, but you have to understand, the police will not let me go... So keep moving and don't look at me and don't look back."

There's a deformity in the information that the public in the United Statesis receiving. It's contained in kind of a bubble and one day this bubble will explode.

The best artists transcend nationality and identity.

My first memory as a child growing up is of playing in the gardens, the mosque is really a gigantic garden, probably the biggest in all of East Jerusalem. Our house was about 100 meters from the mosque.

I was 16 when my father died, and I had a choice to come back and live in his house or I'd stay at the school. But I felt if my father wanted me to go to that school when I was 5, there must have been a reason - and I understood that reason when I was a teenager, because that school became the only place where I was safe.