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Countries and places have a history, a story, and a culture.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

First and foremost, telling historical stories is very tricky because it is something that is known. It is not like you can tell a lie or change something that is written in black and white.

When you have an American mother from the Midwest and an Egyptian father, you travel back and forth and see such completely different stories in the news about the exact same events. It makes you think, 'How is anybody able to understand or even have a dialogue when the basis of information is just so completely different?'

When a story is told really well and is real, even if it's not about their own lives, people can apply it to themselves.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

Everybody's got a different way of telling a story - and has different stories to tell.