It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.

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.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

Do not be the judge of people; do not make assumptions about others. A person is destroyed by holding judgments about others.

Be a dynamo of irrepressible joy!

With all your music, loud and lustily, With every dainty joy of sight and smell, Prepare a banquet meet to entertain The Lord of Thunder, that hath set you free From old oppression.

Ridicule, which chiefly arises from pride, a selfish passion, is but at best a gross pleasure, too rough an entertainment for those who are highly polished and refined.

Its quite pretentious, really, isnt it? The notion the audience is going to be interested in you for an hour and a half. Think too much about that and anxiety takes over.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

Around your skin, I tie and untie mine.

Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon's reflection.

I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.