Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.

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.

Tighten your seat belt and enjoy the ride of life.

Alice: "I'll play you for it. Rock, paper, scissors."Edward: "Why don't you just tell me who wins?"Alice: "I do. Excellent.

I still feel like a kid sometimes myself so hard to believe that I'm a mom. Now I'm an adult! It only took 38 years!

When we learn to eat properly we begin to rebuild our bodies and to fulfill our purpose on this planet to grow in health, creativity, wisdom, and compassion.

The poetic side of me is Scottish.

Revenge is for children and the emotionally retarded.

When a ball goes into a net it only means something because we decided it means something. When somebody punches somebody in the face it always means something.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness.

I was there [in school] the full time with one teacher, and the student body was never more than 10 or 12 students of all ages.

There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.