Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

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.

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.

However much silence you behold, that amount of intellect will stop.

Black is bountiful. White is witful. Together they are beautiful.

In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup.

It is the winners who write history - their way.

But all thing which that shineth as the gold Ne is no gold, as I have herd it told.

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

I'm not really comfortable in any one spot.

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs Better than all the stalemate an's and ifs.

Life begins at forty, but so does arthritis, and the habit of telling the same story three times to the same person.