Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.

English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.

Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.

I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

I know when you say a lie... and now I bet 200$ that you lie.

Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.

I resent the idea that people would blame the messenger for the message, rather than looking at the content of the message itself.

The world is a wheel always turning.

As President Bush has said on numerous occasions, it is the government's role to create the conditions, the friendly environment, that will attract capital.

Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge.

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.

My research clearly reveals that if we want to put inner-city workers to work immediately, we just can't rely on the private sector. They don't want to touch them; they don't want to hire them.