RABIH ALAMEDDINE

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

I oscillate between being cynical and being naive on a regular basis. I always think that not much shocks me until something much too obvious does.

I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.

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

A game of soccer induces more than enjoyment, more than entertainment.

If I were to pray in Arabic, I'd pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I'd pray to God.

I know many sports fans that don't enjoy soccer. The argument is that there's no action, not enough of it.

I've never had a problem finding a team, a league, or a pickup game. Actually, I'm not sure I want soccer to get bigger. We have so many teams in San Francisco that there aren't enough fields.

I loved problems on paper, and I was good at math, but I was a mechanical engineer, and I never understood - or cared to - how a car worked.

A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.

In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.

There are over 1 million refugees in Lebanon, a country of 4 million people. How do we solve that? I have no idea. What's going on, I really don't know.

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

The reasons why a player is better on one club than on another are many. I certainly am not an expert and can't explain.

I think I'm being conservative when I say there are more people playing soccer in the United States than in 90% of the world's other countries, probably 95%.

In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.

Soccer is the most widely played sport in the U.S.

I can easily hold two opposing beliefs at the same time without any problem, which I find - well, mind-expanding, really.

For me, soccer was a dance.

I always say show me a storyteller who doesn't embellish, and I'll show you a bad one.

The relationship between France and its 'foreign' players - blacks and North African Arabs - has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.

We seem, particularly over here in the West and in America in particular, to have forgotten that we are, in large measures, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

If you want to know whether soccer is big in America, pick a weekend, go to any park in the land, and pay attention. We're there. We've always been.

'Harat' is actually - it's a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from 'the mapmaker,' somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit.