Arabic Quotes

I've got Arabic music in my blood.

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company, I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying, even if by chance they are later proved right.'

Everybody needs to understand that I learned Arabic from the United States Army as a second language. I never spoke it at home.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

I haven't spoken English with native speakers in several months. I've been speaking Arabic.

I might do something in Arabic. I might do something in Hebrew.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

I want the Arabic Granada, that which is art, which is all that seems to me beauty and emotion.

I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

But my Arabic is pretty good. It's good enough to have conversations with people, to understand what they say, to understand what they're feeling.

A small film from a small country, in Arabic with nonprofessionals: It was practically impossible. Just to make it was like a dream to me.

I think my dad is the only Arabic descendent who is an unsuccessful businessman.