Quotes from Rabih Alameddine

A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.

In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.

I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.

In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.

If you go through any culture that has had wars, go to the bomb shelters, and you'll hear some amazing stories. Yes, it's a necessary thing that we actually both distract ourselves and it's a way to bond.

When I was younger, I used to find stories about divas charming. Not much anymore.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.

If you want to know whether soccer is big in America, pick a weekend, go to any park in the land, and pay attention. We're there. We've always been.

I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we grew up with. Both on a personal level and a collective level.

If I were to pray in Arabic, I'd pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I'd pray to God.

I have to admit, I'm not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.

I've never had a problem finding a team, a league, or a pickup game. Actually, I'm not sure I want soccer to get bigger. We have so many teams in San Francisco that there aren't enough fields.

I was gay before I began to play soccer over 40 years ago. It's been 28 years since a friend and I organized one of the first gay soccer teams in the world.

As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.

I couldn't tell the truth if my life depended on it.

'Harat' is actually - it's a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from 'the mapmaker,' somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit.

Soccer is the most widely played sport in the U.S.

We seem, particularly over here in the West and in America in particular, to have forgotten that we are, in large measures, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Before prognostication, a disclaimer: I have never been able to pick a winner. Not that it has ever stopped me from trying to. Well, it has stopped me from buying stock, but let's not talk about that.

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.

I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read.

My father loved Brazilian football, a diehard follower, so of course, he hated Germany and always rooted against them, always.