Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

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.

Others can’t give you inner-peace. Your children, spouse, priest or friends can’t give it to you. You have to create it yourself.

Future will always remember the heroes, its because of them there exist a future.

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

When it comes to fashion or any high art, you have to have a combination of delicacy, along with taste.

Hollywood Regency is a label some people put on me, but I consider myself a modernist in that I always try to make the work feel fresh.

Obstacles! Man needs obstacles to get matured!

I don't understand small businesses, only big ones. Marriage is the hardest small business.

I'm always trying to see things from different peoples' perspectives, to understand why they love something.

Drawing ... is an innocent & engaging amusement, often useful, and a qualification not to be neglected in one who is to become a mother & an instructor.

Some people asked me if I would be interested in managing the A's. I said a definite no thank you. At night, that place is a graveyard with lights.