I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn't.

Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.

The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world.

And wit's the noblest frailty of the mind.

Every man loves what he is good at.

Hope is a very thin diet.

I am, out of the ladies' company, like a fish out of the water.

No man is happy but by comparison.

Words may be false and full of art; Sighs are the natural language of the heart.