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.

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

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.

Faith all grown up is trust.

...and the day will come...Maybe not tomorrow maybe not next week but it will come nevertheless, when you awaken and realise, it just a foolishly beautiful dream...

Respect the colony as an organism rather than a mechanism with interchangeable parts.

I think I can speak on behalf of women and say that every woman wants a man who just loves them and lusts after them.

Then when you think in years to come Of Birthdays long ago You may remember fondly How much we love you so.

Ive always been really inspired by watching top athletes putting in peak performances.

Hitting your head against a wall is not the fastest way to move it.

As I stepped on the moon, I looked around, dazed...magnifice nt. The vast, sandy silver surface was almost illusory.

I think most conflicts do end with negotiated settlements; some don't, but most do.

In heaven, knowledge shall be commensurate with the enlarged powers of the glorified soul.