“The problem is not the occupation, but how people deal with it.”

Hezbollah fighters are on the borders with Lebanon where the terrorists attacked them. On the borders with Lebanon, this is where Hezbollah retaliated, and this is where we have cooperation, and that’s good.

How can you be afraid to feel? Isn’t fear a feeling? If you’re feeling fear, you’ve felt one of the most negative emotions there is to feel.

With the time, yes we can be worried, because the secular state should reflect secular society, and this secular society, with the time, if you don’t get rid of those terrorists and these extremists and the Wahabi style, of course it will influence at least the new and the coming generations.

There’s a video on YouTube where the terrorists clearly make trials [of chemical weapons] on a rabbit and kill the rabbit and said “this is how we’re going to kill the Syrian people.”

You want me to believe American evidence and don’t want me to believe the indications that we have. We live here, this is our reality.

You cannot be desperate when the army is making advances. That should have happened – if we take into consideration that this presumption is correct and this is reality – you use it when you’re in a desperate situation.

The question is who threw chemicals on the same day on our soldiers. That’s the same question. Technically, not the soldiers. Soldiers don’t throw missiles on themselves. So, either the rebels, the terrorists, or a third party. We don’t have any clue yet.

We are worried that rebels are taking control in many countries, and look at the results now. Are you satisfied as an American ? What are the results ? Nothing. Very bad – nothing good.

Our democracy should reflect our culture and our habits and our customs and our reality at the same time.

There is no such things as “Islamic terrorism,” because terrorism differs from Islam. There’s just terrorism, not Islamic terrorism. But the term “Islamic terrorism” has become widespread.

Before the 11th of September, in my discussions with many officials of the United States, some of them are Congressmen, I used to say that “don’t deal with terrorists as playing games.” It’s a different story. You’re going to pay the price if you’re not wise in dealing with terrorists.

That’s the problem with the American position; they think that they are the police of the world.

We don’t say that we don’t have it, we’re still secular in Syria, but with the time, this secularism will be eroded.

As a state, as a government, in 2001 we proposed to the United Nations to empty or to get rid of every WMD in the Middle East, and the United States stood against that proposal. This is our conviction and policy.

This is where we can discuss the evidence [of the chemical weapons ], but he doesn’t have it. He didn’t present it because he doesn’t have it, Kerry doesn’t have it. No one in your administration has it. If they had it, they would have presented it to you as media from the first day.

[United States] are sovereign country, they are an independent country, but this is their limit; they don’t have to interfere in any other country.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

My father was a fish market porter. So I grew up on fish, because he used to steal one a day, I grew up on the very best fish that money could buy, ’cause he only stole the good stuff.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

My dad worked in a very typical first-generation immigrant fashion – 24 hours a day for years.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

My sole occupation is love.