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.

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.

It is strange how often a heart must be broken Before the years can make it wise.

Learning to focus on the big picture will help you keep things in a proper perspective.

Earlier men craved for love from women, nowadays they ask everything except love!

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value. . . .

The accents are really really funny. I think I could convince somebody I was from New Zealand.

That's the problem with having a moral code. We want to destroy the jerkish part of the jerks, but we want to save the human being underneath.

Loving, hating, having expectations: all these are attachments. Attachment prevents the growth of one's true being.

In your hurry to keep Christmas, you have forgotten Christmas. The truest gift of Christmas is the gift of self.

For lack of an occasional expression of love, a relationship strong at the seams can wear thin in the middle.