Elliott Colla Quotes
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.
Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.
Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.
The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.
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.
There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.
The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.
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.
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.
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.
Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.
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.
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.
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.
