Hassan Blasim Quotes

#1. When my stories were translated into other languages and received good reviews in the international press and won prizes, some Arab festivals and newspapers began to take an interest in what I had produced. This sudden Arab interest is a form of hypocrisy and nonsense.

Hassan Blasim

#2. Knowledge and imagination are the life buoy and the extra lung for breathing outside the walls of a tainted reality.

Hassan Blasim

#3. It's bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story's a story, whether it's beautiful or bullshit.

Hassan Blasim

#4. I live in a small country in Europe - Finland - and I don't speak English well and I had nothing to do with publishing houses in the West. I lived in complete isolation.

Hassan Blasim

#5. I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert.

Hassan Blasim

#6. Spilled blood and superstition are the basis of the world. Man is not the only creature who kills for bread, or love, or power, because animals in the jungle do that in various ways, but he is the only creature who kills because of faith.

Hassan Blasim

#7. I'm talking about the essence of humanity. Hope is mixed into the blood of every human being, everywhere and in every time.

Hassan Blasim

#8. You learn something from the classics but your feelings and your imagination operate in the domain of the colloquial. We need to think seriously about reforming the Arabic that we use today.

Hassan Blasim

#9. I've been working on the margins and I was aware of this choice from the start. I buy most of what's written and produced in the Arab world and I don't much like it.

Hassan Blasim

#10. I wanted to reach back to other times I might have lived in, the traces of which are scattered to places I previously thought imaginary.

Hassan Blasim

#11. The question of humanity can be solved only by constant dread.

Hassan Blasim

#12. How can one talk in a classical language about a child who's torn apart in an explosion in the market near his school? People in Iraq don't talk about their joys, their problems, and the destruction of the country in literary diction.

Hassan Blasim

#13. "Secret migration" across borders is a form of human degradation and evidence of the depravity of the human conscience.

Hassan Blasim

#14. Migration was not the only unpleasant experience I went though. I was born and lived in a country ruled by a brutal dictator whose wars never ended, and from an early age I was passionate about understanding the world through knowledge.

Hassan Blasim

#15. For seven years I wrote and published my texts on the Internet and no Arab festival invited me and no Arab publishing house wanted to publish my books, and I wasn't known in the Western world because of my political positions.

Hassan Blasim

#16. Losing hope means ceasing to love my son and my girlfriend and many friends and people around the world.

Hassan Blasim

#17. On more than one occasion I heard how life apparently advances, moves on, sets sail or, at worst, apparently crawls slowly forward. My life, on the other hand, simply exploded like a firecracker in the hand of God, a small flare in his mighty firmament of bombardment.

Hassan Blasim

#18. The Iran-Iraq war began the same year that I went to primary school, at the age of six.

Hassan Blasim

#19. I studied at the Academy during the years of economic sanctions. Life was almost dead because the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the civilized world were so strict.

Hassan Blasim

#20. I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.

Hassan Blasim

#21. Whenever we went out to film in the street we would end up in the police station and in the offices of some other security agency. They deliberately intimidated us. I moved to Kurdistan and changed my name and made my first feature film in Kurdistan with very basic resources.

Hassan Blasim

#22. It's ridiculous and painful to use the Arabic of an Iraqi poet who lived centuries ago to describe what we in Iraq are suffering today.

Hassan Blasim

#23. The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know. If from time to time we hear the opposite, then those are just trivial religious and poetical exaggerations and ridiculous rumors, which have nothing to do with the real circumstances of the simple dead.

Hassan Blasim

#24. I'm not much interested in prizes, whether from the Arab world or from the Western world. Writing is a very difficult process and I want to continue my work.

Hassan Blasim

#25. Then he thrust the knife into my stomach and said:
You're shaking.

Hassan Blasim

#26. The people in Arab countries are now speaking out and asking many questions about human rights, minorities, religion, democracy, "the other," and so on.

Hassan Blasim

#27. We in Iraq have not descended from another planet. Just as people in many other countries have gotten over the tragedy of war, Iraq will get over its ordeal.

Hassan Blasim

#28. I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other words. I also used to describe at great length the way people in the area lived.

Hassan Blasim

#29. Every man has both a poetic obligation and a human obligation.

Hassan Blasim

#30. Some Iraqi writers are more daring today and have excellent imaginations and their material is rich in human experience. But the Arab prizes, once again, are part of the context of life in the Arab world - anarchy, confusion, and corruption.

Hassan Blasim

#31. While I was studying film at the Academy, the problems started. I wasn't a political activist directly in the time of Saddam [Hussein], because the dictator was so cruel and brutal that no one could criticize or complain. I felt futile and empty. The only solution in Iraq was to run away.

Hassan Blasim

#32. I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

Hassan Blasim

#33. You can't understand beauty without peace of mind and you can't get close to the truth without fear.

Hassan Blasim

#34. In fact I didn't think about fear much at the time. I felt angry about everything that was happening around me: the violence of the dictatorship and the violence of society.

Hassan Blasim

#35. The trail of "secret migration" was a shock to me. I knew a little about the difficulties, just bits of news in the media.

Hassan Blasim

#36. We used to watch executions. I mentioned that in one of my stories. There was a piece of open ground near the area where we lived and we used to play soccer there. That was where they used to hold public executions for soldiers who deserted the army and members of the Kurdish resistance.

Hassan Blasim

#37. One of the Baathists once told me, "If you're not careful, I'll have you put away," and those words meant death.

Hassan Blasim