I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic. - Rabih Alameddine

I don't sit down to write something politically or to challenge stereotypes. Being who I am, almost everything I do will be political, almost everything I do will be a challenge to those stereotypes…

If you sit with your memories, you might as well become a plant.

God tells us men fucking men is a terrible thing, but a father offering his two daughters, vestal virgins no less, to a horde of horny buggers is heroic. Now that's straight. … God destroys the faggots with fire and brimstone. He turns a disobedient wife into salt. But he asks us to idolize drunks who sleep with their daughters or offer them to a horny, unruly mob.