Personal Life
Norquist has described himself as a "boring white bread Methodist." In 2004, at age 48, he married a Palestinian Muslim named Samah Alrayyes, a Kuwaiti PR specialist who was formerly a director of the Islamic Free Market Institute and specialist at the Bureau of Legislative and Public Affairs at United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The couple has two children adopted from abroad. Norquist is said to live a modest lifestyle. According to friend and former roommate John Fund, Norquist's devotion to his political causes is "monk-like" and comparable to that of Ralph Nader.
Norquist has competed three times in the comedy fundraiser "Washington's Funniest Celebrity" and placed second in 2009. Humorist P. J. O'Rourke has described Norquist as "Tom Paine crossed with Lee Atwater plus just a soupçon of Madame Defarge".
Read more about this topic: Grover Norquist
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“He hadn’t known me fifteen minutes, and yet he was ... ready to talk ... I was still to learn that Munshin, like many people from the capital, could talk openly about his personal life while remaining a dream of espionage in his business operations.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)