Anthony Shadid Quotes

When I took off from Providence, my only professional aspiration was what it had always been: I wanted to be a sportscaster. By the time I landed in the desert, I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to be a writer.

I never saw an actor and thought, 'Wow, I want to be like that.' It's just I wanted it to be part of my life.

I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

I didn't feel like I was meant to be a nurse or a secretary.

Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself.

By the time I was ready for college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I think I secretly wanted a show business career, but I was suppressing it.

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

As I look back over my life, before I had any real identity, I was a traveler. I grew up an Army brat, a runaway, an activist, and a musician. All my life I've been traveling.

I knew after my first lesson what I wanted to do with my life.

When I was in 10th grade, I took one of those tests that's supposed to tell you what you should be when you grow up. The test told me that I should be a journalist.

Because I had children relatively late - in my 40s rather than in my 20s - it wasn't anything I ever knew that I would do. It kind of happened to me: I met the right woman and we had children. It was a revelation because it suddenly makes me realize, 'Oh, I get it. Now I know what to do with the rest of my life.'

In the midst of applying for American citizenship, of finally attempting to get my presidents in a row, I felt it incumbent upon myself to explore the national psyche in every way.

Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.

So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it's all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me.

When I moved to New York at 22, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I took an improv class, and the first scene I did, I felt like 'I want to do this for the rest of my life.' It was the first time I ever felt like that about anything. I tried to make a living off improv.

When I was 17 or 18 and it was time to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I didn't enjoy anything as much as I enjoyed playing music. I felt that I had no choice: that I had to become a musician.

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

My father was a newspaper editor, so I was surrounded by journalists my entire life. I think the fact that he was so well known may be why I chose to go into magazines and move to the States at a young age.

And then a great thing in my life was going to India.

I've spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco.

The big turn in the late '90s was that I realized I was going to be doing this for a long time. I was fairly sure I was going to be an actor for the rest of my life, which I think calmed me down.

The real blame (for the lack of peace in the Middle East) should be directed at us, the leaders of the Arab nation.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

My father encouraged me to work in the library, just because it was the world that he knew. But I also wanted to do it. I also wanted to work in the library and be part of the library somehow, because it represented a world that really wasn't represented in my home, and I wanted it to be.