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

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.

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.

After every sunny day, comes a stormy night

Preoccupied with a single leaf you won't see the tree.

The wisest married men give in early. They get in touch with the wife side of themselves, and that's when they stop arguing.

I try to eat healthy all the time. I don't eat takeaways. I drink mostly water or coconut water.

To understand what is right meditation there must be an awareness of the operation of one's own consciousness, and then there is complete attention.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public

If not for reverence, if not for wonder, if not for love, why have we come here?

Counterfeiters exist because there is such a thing as real gold.

Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive.