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.

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.

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.

... only a seer or a lover would know that I'm making a jewelry of words for you -drawn from your essence -to flash and burn with your fire -so you can bedazzle with your own light ...

Lieutenant Trotta wasn't experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books

A priceless moment is when the person that you have fallen in love with, looks you right in the eyes to tells you that they have fallen in love with you.

She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.

Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.

If you go fishing you may not catch any fish. If you don't go fishing, you'll never catch any fish.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

If she [woman] is weak in striking, she is strong in suffering.

I'm a good judge of my own work.

POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.