When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

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.

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.

Hunger gives flavour to the food.

Her belly ruptures full of parasites, Her eyes sink back in her skull Her butchered wrists, dangle From the edge of the bathtubHer children cuddle against her Desperate for love she cannot give

Let me kiss you and take your breath away, we'll worry about resuscitating you later.

We have to let the Warrior Code rule our hearts. The death of a warrior does not mean victory.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.

People in the U.S. will watch anything if it's put in front of their face over and over again. I like to see what's possible, more than anything.

I will work tirelessly to defend all communities, including the LGBTQ one, from terrorism and violence.

My goal now is to remember every place I've been, only do things I love, and not say yes when I don't mean it.

Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.