Rabih Alameddine

“Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“Belief is the enemy of a storyteller”

— Rabih Alameddine

“I have my writers’ neuroses but not their talents.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“I'm not stupid, romantic, or a busy Russian novelist.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“I feel at home in my rituals.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“Forgetting is as integral to memory as death is to life.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“Hope, the great deceiver, seduced her that morning.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“Passion was the antithesis of morality.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“I realised when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“Cioran once said that “one touch of clearsightedness reduces us to our primary state: nakedness.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“I read books—read, read, one can learn everything from books.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“Other people are hazy phenomena that become corporeal only in my memories.”

— Rabih Alameddine

For someone like me and my generation, you had to speak French to be sophisticated, you had to be lighter-skinned.

— Rabih Alameddine

“Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within…

— Rabih Alameddine

“Nick commenced a monologue explaining the impossibility of such a phenomenon: the subordination of content to the aesthetics of language in Arabic…

— Rabih Alameddine

“I believe that the choice of a first book, the book that opens your eyes and quickens your soul, is as involuntary…

— Rabih Alameddine

“We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or…

— Rabih Alameddine

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of…

— Rabih Alameddine

I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we…

— Rabih Alameddine

“You never believed in God, Doc, did you? You said if God created man in His image, why couldn't man invent a…

— Rabih Alameddine

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need…

— Rabih Alameddine

“One's first response is that these Beirutis must be savagely insane to murder each other for such trivial divergences. Don't judge us…

— Rabih Alameddine

I'm surprised how often I'm asked about being a man with a woman narrator. I'm not the first, nor will I be…

— Rabih Alameddine

“You looked inhuman when you were dying, Doc, your eyes glistened like dimming stars, you were wasting away and life was leaving…

— Rabih Alameddine

I love a lot of American writers, but I think that for the most part the scope of what's accepted as great…

— Rabih Alameddine

“I’d read through the whole thing twice, and I used to go on and on: Marcel, the spectacular writer, my idol, and…

— Rabih Alameddine

Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to…

— Rabih Alameddine

Me? I was lost for long time. I didn’t make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with…

— Rabih Alameddine

“I like men and women who don't fit well in the dominant culture, or, as Alvar de Campos calls them, strangers in…

— Rabih Alameddine

“When I asked my father why Mademoiselle Finkelstein was such a cruel woman, he said it was because she was unmarried, which…

— Rabih Alameddine

“We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything…

— Rabih Alameddine

“On Lou's lips a trace of pinot and out of them poured tales of acts of viciousness worthy of the great Lucifer…

— Rabih Alameddine

I think in Arabic at times, but when I'm writing it's all in English. And I don't try to make my English…

— Rabih Alameddine

“I've only read one other book of his, Danube, from which, among his many impeccable sentences, one wrapped its octopus arms around…

— Rabih Alameddine

When I published my first work, I thought I would never be able to go back to Lebanon. I thought they'd arrest…

— Rabih Alameddine

“Isn't someone's life more than a collecion of scenes? Isn't she more than the images I have compiled in my head? These…

— Rabih Alameddine

“My patience, like my time in this world, grows shorter.”

— Rabih Alameddine