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.

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.

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.

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.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

I am in a cage. I desire to be set free.

Lust starts with chemistry. Love starts with trust and respect.

if someone gets jealous from you, that the sign of your progress

Traffic in Joburg is like the democratic process. Every time you think it's going to get moving and take you somewhere, you hit another jam.

As children, we have a tenuous idea of love; we often try to quantify it with how much we feel seen and heard.

I want to play positive role models - women who mean something to other women.

Why must we be eternally on our knees before the Kants and Hugos?

Even if the song meant a lot to me, I would still probably perform it live.

Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.