The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.

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.

How do you get all those coins?" asked Mort.IN PAIRS.

Contra: Why don't you trust me honey? Wait, rather I doubt that you are in a going around.

many people who think they know do not know what they know and only know what they do not know

Like everyone, I have my challenges—but they sure don’t have me.

It doesn't think anything we don't want it to think.''That's sad, ' said Montag, quietly, 'because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know.

Where there is a wine-shop, there are the elements of disease and the frightful source of all that is at enmity with the interests of the workmen.

Ah, that is a perfume in which I delight; when they roast coffee near my house, I hasten to open the door to take in all the aroma.

We in the Great White North but you can bite my White South!

I've always loved my own little office spaces no matter what they were like. It's the Virginia Woolf, room of one's own concept, it's really important.

I do not like work even when someone else is doing it.