The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

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.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

The man you love cooking for you is good for you too.

I run a modest-sized laboratory thats looking specifically at what we call the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease, or AIDS.

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.

All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that's why you so often want to kill each other.

By all means must we fly; not with our feet, however, but with our hands.

Today's a great day to change a life. Starting with yours.

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.

True #leadership isn't the bastion of a few who sit at the top ... We all need to step up, take the risk and put our interests second-not always-but when it counts.

I know this golf tournament has my name on it but it's not about me. It's about the Louisiana Tech family. There is nothing greater than being a part of the Bulldog family.