The trail of "secret migration" was a shock to me. I knew a little about the difficulties, just bits of news in the media.

Knowledge and imagination are the life buoy and the extra lung for breathing outside the walls of a tainted reality.

I'm talking about the essence of humanity. Hope is mixed into the blood of every human being, everywhere and in every time.

It's ridiculous and painful to use the Arabic of an Iraqi poet who lived centuries ago to describe what we in Iraq are suffering today.

I studied at the Academy during the years of economic sanctions. Life was almost dead because the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the civilized world were so strict.

One of the Baathists once told me, "If you're not careful, I'll have you put away," and those words meant death.

We in Iraq have not descended from another planet. Just as people in many other countries have gotten over the tragedy of war, Iraq will get over its ordeal.

In fact I didn't think about fear much at the time. I felt angry about everything that was happening around me: the violence of the dictatorship and the violence of society.

I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

You learn something from the classics but your feelings and your imagination operate in the domain of the colloquial. We need to think seriously about reforming the Arabic that we use today.

Maybe we will meet again in the paths of dreaming, but my heart tells me this is farewell.

Revenge is a kind of justice. But it is applicable only in wild and lawless places. Says Bhutta

PRESIDENCY, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

Technology doesn't have to be difficult to use or complicated. I feel technology is something that's there to make your life easier not more difficult.

Fashion is about owning whatever you're wearing, regardless of if it's a high fashion statement or not.

[Apollo 7 was] an expedition of the mind, not of the heart.

Facebook is for people, Twitter is for perspective, Google+ is for passion, LinkedIn is for pimping

Returning to the source is stillness. It is returning to one's fate. Returning to one's fate is eternal.

We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

Now, if I think a scene should go a certain way and it goes another, I'm able to go that new way with ease.