G. Willow Wilson Quotes

There's a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren't enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture.

It's why men are meant to have beards - growing all that hair leaves no energy for moodiness. Much more dignified.

We are faith. We speak all languages of beauty and hardship.

Metaphors are dangerous. Calling something by a false name changes it, and metaphor is just a fancy way of calling something by a false name.

I don't understand," said Alif. "What does this have to do with The Thousand and One Days? It's not a holy book. Not even to the jinn. It's a bunch of fairy tales with double meanings that we can't figure out."
"How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain."
"Your mother's dense." Alif said wearily.
"My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that's neither here nor there. Stories are words, Alif, and words, like ذرة, sometimes represent much grander things. The humans who originally obtained the Alf Yeom thought they could derive immense power from it-thus, it was in their best interests to preserve these manuscripts the best way they knew how. That way, even if they never cracked the code themselves, the books would be vital and healthy for future generations, who might have more success.

Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.

You know those day you sometimes have? The days that seem totally ordinary when you wake up, but by the time you go to sleep that night, your whole life is divided into before that day and after that day? This is one of those days.

An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.

It's an awful thing, you know, to be tolerated - everyone needs you, nobody wants you.

A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.

I would have done anything for Intisar. Her love was like three kebab meals to me, with tahini and hot peppers. I never took her for granted. Never.

Very well," it said. "I am a mighty fortress, sheathed in stone."
King Vikram thought for a moment.
"I am a catapult," he said. "Stone-breaking, fortress-sundering."
"I am a saboteur," countered the vetala. "Oath-breaker, weapon disabler."
"I am ill luck," said King Vikram. "Upending plots, dismaying plans."
The vetala was favorably impressed.
"I am fortune," it said. "I crown luck with destiny."
"I am free will," said King Vikram. "I challenge destiny with choice."
"I am divine will," said the vetala, "to which choice and destiny are one and the same."
"I am myself," said King Vikram. "The only thing that is mine to give, by choice or by destiny.

How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain."
"Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily.
"My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor there.

Revolutions are 90% social diarrhea.

Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.

There's always that one group of people who think they have special permission to terrorize anybody who disagrees with them. And then everybody who looks like them suffers.

Of course," mused Vikram, oblivious to Alif's noncommittal demeanor, "there were days when the world was crawling with walis and prophets who could stare right at us, but that was a long time ago. Now it's different. Now you are more interested in the veil between man and photon than the one between man and jinn."
"Good," muttered Alif, becoming uncomfortable.
"So you say, but you may think differently when you discover all roads of inquiry end in the same place.

People love to talk about new and different. They don't always love to buy and read new and different.

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.

I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

There is infinite space within a human life.

My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing.

There was always something yet unseen. The ground itself was daily renewed, kicked up and muddled by passing travelers, such that it was impossible to repeat the same journey twice. Alif thought of all the times he had left the duplex in Baqara District bent on some mundane errand: the courtyard gate closing behind him with a rattle, rattling again when he returned the same way; to him, ordinary and frustrating, to the world, a process full of tiny variations, all existing, as Sheikh Bilal had said, simultaneously and without contradiction. He had been given eternity in modest increments, and had thought nothing of it.

All problems are simply interruptions in the transmission and preservation of data, he reminded himself.

My synesthesia is mostly gone - it was a much bigger factor when I was a kid. But having no depth perception is a bonus when you're trying to lay out flat images and describe them to an artist - flat is all I see.

When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.

Good is not a thing you are. It is a thing you do.

How ridiculous," said Princess Farukhuaz, reclining upon a pillow. "A waste of a perfectly good king, all to pacify a few villagers who might have fared as well with a decent exorcist. Nobility is overrated."
"Perhaps," said the nurse. "On the other hand, Vikram might have a greater part to play as a vetala than as a king. The right thing to do and the smart thing to do are not always the same. Only the Lord of Lords knows all, and He created the world three-parts unseen.

To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.

There's this ayah from the Quran that my dad always quotes when he sees something bad on TV. A fire or a flood or a bombing. "Whoever kills one person, it is as if he has killed all of mankind ... And whoever saves one person, it is as if he has saved all of mankind." When I was a little kid, that always made me feel better. Because no matter how bad things get there are always people who rush in to help. And according to my dad they are blessed.

If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.

Yes. You do understand, you do. I knew you would. It was that analogy you made to the Quran that got me thinking in the first place. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction. The stag and the doe and the trap. Instead of working with linear strings of ones and zeroes, the computer could work with bundles that were one and zero and every point in between, all at once. If, if, if you could teach it to overcome its binary nature."
"That sounds very complicated indeed."
"It should be impossible, but it isn't." Alif began typing furiously. "All modern computers are pedants. To them the world is divided into black and white, off and on, right and wrong. But I will teach yours to recognize multiple origin points, interrelated geneses, systems of multivalent cause and effect.

I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy.

I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

Unique is not the same as alone.

She did not know that a copy of her incomplete thesis sat behind one of his firewalls, ensuring her words would survive any event short of the apocalypse. These were the only gestures that made sense to him. So much of what he felt did not translate.

In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.

I was afraid you'd turn into one of those literary types who say books can change the world when they're feeling good about themselves and it's only a book when anybody challenges them.

The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.

Revolutions are ninety percent social diarrhea.

I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't.

They had no idea what it was like to live in a place that boasted one of the most sophisticated digital policing systems in the world, but no proper mail service. Emirates with princes in silver-plated cars and districts with no running water. An Internet where every blog, every chat room, every forum is monitored for illegal expressions of distress and discontent.

A marvel," the sheikh said. "Truly, the work of the Lord of the Worlds surpasses all our puny understanding. You know, I read once that the human mind is incapable of imagining anything that does not exist somewhere, in some form. It seemed a paltry enough truth at the time-I thought, of course it must be so, since in a sense everything we will ever discover or invent has, in the eyes of God, already been discovered and invented, as God is above time. Seeing this, though, I begin to understand how much more profound that statement is. It does not simply mean that man's innovation is entirely known to God; it means there is no such thing as fiction.

We try men through one another. - Quran 6:53

The suggestion that the Alf Yeom is the work of jinn is surely a curious one. The Quran speaks of the hidden people in the most candid way, yet more and more the educated faithful will not admit to believing in them, however readily they might accept even the harshest and most obscure points of Islamic law. That God has ordained that a thief must pay for his crime with his hand, that a woman must inherit half of what a man inherits-these things are treated not only as facts, but as obvious facts, whereas the existence of conscious beings we cannot see-and all the fantastic and wondrous things that their existence suggests and makes possible-produces profound discomfort among precisely that cohort of Muslims most lauded for their role in that religious "renaissance" presently expected by western observers: young degree-holding traditionalists. Yet how hollow rings a tradition in which the law, which is subject to interpretation, is held as sacrosanct, yet the word of God is not to be trusted when it comes to His description of what He has created.
I do not know what I believe.

Superstition is thriving. Pedantry is thriving. Sectarianism is thriving. Belief is dying out. To most of your people the jinn are paranoid fantasies who run around causing epilepsy and mental illness. Find me someone to whom the hidden folk are simply real, as described in the Books. You'll be searching a long time. Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent. And that, cousin, is why I can't help you.

Be careful with this one" said Dina, bending down to greet the cat. "All cats are half jinn, but I think she's three quarters.

I think people, especially in the Muslim community, are rightly cautious any time you hear, 'Oh, there's going to be a Muslim character.'

What do you mean, words whose meanings evolved?" asked Alif. "That doesn't make sense. The Quran is the Quran."
Vikram folded his legs-Alif did not watch this operation closely-and smiled at his audience.
"The convert will understand. How do they translate ذرة in your English interpretation?"
"Atom," said the convert.
You don't find that strange, considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?"
The convert chewed her lip. "I never thought of that," she said.
"You're right. There's no way atom is the original meaning of that word."
"Ah." Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction. He looked, Alif thought, like some demonic caricature of a saint. "But it is. In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ذرة, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man. Then man split the atom. Today, the original meaning might be hadron. But why stop there? Tomorrow, it might be quark. In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name. Each of those will be the original meaning of ذرة.
Alif snorted. "That's impossible. ذرة must refer to some fundamental thing. It's attached to an object."
"Yes it is. The smallest indivisible particle. That is the meaning packaged in the word. No part of it lifts out-it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once. Thus, in man's infancy, ذرة was a grain of sand. Then a mote of du

At some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty. I did not believe in Islam; I opened my eyes every morning and saw it.

I think people need a break. It's not like they're out there selling bacon and booze. They want to pretend for a few hours a day that we don't live in this awful hole getting squeezed by State on one side and pious airheads on the other, all while smiling our shit-eating grins so that the oil companies keep shoveling money into our pockets. Surely God wouldn't mind people pretending life is better, even if it involves fictional pork.

It took me a long time to square with the fact that none of my experiences are typical - I'm not a typical American, but I'm also not a typical Muslim.

They will wake up one morning and realize their civilization has been pulled out from under them, inch by inch, dollar by dollar, just as ours was. They will know what it is to have been asleep for the most important century of their history.

I don't think there's something inherently irreligious about comics.

I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.

The Qur'an is God's property, not mine.

Is not just any bint," he said. "This is a philosopher-queen, a sultana ...

It is only given to women to see without being seen - men must act in the open, or not at all.

Yes, you were taught to waste your anger. It's convenient for girls to be angry about nothing. Girls who are angry about something are dangerous. If you want to live, you must learn to use your anger for your own benefit, not the benefit of those who would turn it against you.--Vikram

I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.

It's patently impossible for a Muslim character to represent 'all Muslims.'

In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman's body, Heaven.

In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts
its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things
as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty
but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge

I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.

How weak your little fleshy hands are. Have you ever done anything with them but type and fondle yourself?

I've wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job.

'Habibi' is a complex and unapologetic work of fantasy - no idle undertaking for readers of any faith or no faith at all, but one well worth the trouble.

What happened?"
"Oil." The sheikh shook his head. "The great cursed wealth from beneath the ground that the Prophet foresaw would destroy us. And statehood-what a terrible idea that was, eh? This part of the world was never meant to function that way. Too many languages, too many tribes, too motivated by ideas those high-heeled cartographers from Paris couldn't understand. Don't understand. Will never understand. Well, God save them-they're not the ones who have to live in this mess. They said a modern state needs a single leader, a secular leader, and the emir was the closest thing we had. So to the emir went all the power. And anyone who thinks that isn't a good idea is hounded down and tossed in jail, as you have so recently discovered. All so that some pantywaist royal nephew can have a seat at the UN and carry a flag in the Olympics and be thoroughly ignored.

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'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.

It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it.

It will be a long while until I shall call myself well. I think perhaps too long - longer than I have left to live. But for now, I feel a great deal better than I did, and that is enough.

Knowledge must be fixed in some way if it is to be preserved," said the sheikh. "That's why the Quran isn't meant to be altered. There were other prophets sent to other peoples, but because their books were altered, their knowledge was lost.

So the stories aren't just stories, is what you're saying. They're really secret knowledge disguised as stories."
"One could say that of all stories, younger brother.

Alif found himself succumbing to the silence of the place, a quiet so open and broad that it seemed almost to roar, as though it was not silence at all but music in some ancient inaudible key. His eyes drifted shut and he slept without dreaming.

Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.

The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.

It's not the size of the girl in the fight that counts... it's the size of the fight in the girl! -MISS MARVEL

Choosing a spouse with religion in mind is not always a mistake, especially if your heritage and your faith are important parts of who you are. The trick is, as always, to recognize a good thing when you see it - and never mistake the bad for something more.

Love the life you have been given. And be humbled by it. It is not to be despised.

Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent.

There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.

He was impotent, here as in the outside world, his utility confined to punching commands into computers. Beyond the bedroom where he sat day after day like an idle spider in the midst of a digital Web he was boneless, protected only by a black carapace of T-shirts and jeans, unprepared for physical danger. His mind struggled against the limits of his body.

Destiny and choice are the same thing. You chose to be here, so it couldn't have happened any other way.

Fear can make anything real," said Vikram. "The black-cloaks are afraid you're a sorcerer. If they condemn you as a sorcerer and burn you for it, then you are, for all practical purposes, a sorcerer, whether you began as one or not. Fear doesn't need to make sense in order to have consequences.

But being someone else isn't liberating. It's exhausting.

We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional port a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real.

'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.

Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.

I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.

Muslims are ordinary members of the working public, just like you.

I think that's a huge theme in superhero books across the board: When you have this massive power, how do you use it responsibly? When do you intervene? Those are the big questions.

When have I ever suggested you burn them? I am allowed to have opinions, aren't I? And I don't hate them - I don't give a fig about them. The only reason I cared is because you were so comfortable belittling me for believing things you only read about. I was afraid you'd turn into one of those literary types who say books can change the world when they're feeling good about themselves and it's only a book when anybody challenges them. It wasn't about the books themselves - it was about hypocrisy. You can speak casually about burning the Alf Yeom for the same reason you'd be horrified if I suggested burning The Satanic Verses - because you have reactions, not convictions.

I know it's common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers.

You have such an odd relationship to your environment," mused the man. "Such a paranoid relationship. You seem intent on existing in smaller and smaller spaces, filled with more and more gadgets, with the mistaken impression that this will give you more control over your lives. There's something a little impious about it."
"Nothing wrong with gadgets," muttered Alif.
"No, except that they're not magic," said the man, "and a lot of you seem to believe they should be.

In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.

You lent me The Golden Compass! It's full of jinni trickery, and you were angry at me when I told you that made it dangerous! Why do you get mad when religion tells you that the things you want to be true are true?
When it's true, it's not fun anymore. All right? When it's true it's scary.

I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time.