Rabih Alameddine

"One of the things that was obvious to me after I started getting upset about so many things was, I wasn’t upset at the world, I was upset at myself,” he said. “Somewhere along the line, 1996, all my friends died, and I decided that to be able to survive, I must put everything aside. And I did. That was the date, by the way, that I started writing my first book….All of a sudden, I’m a writer. I have a career, I have a life. I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t remembering. Jacob begins the book by getting upset at these young gay men for forgetting queer history, but it’s him, it’s me, that allowed people to forget, because I forgot."

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

"I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic."

"I dont 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…"