If you silence yourself, if you try to be good, if you try to be polite, or toe a party line, you end up paying for that in the long run. You pay for it... with your homeland, or with your soul, or with your artistic vision.

I'm constantly at war with myself to quit goofing around, and the internet hasn't helped that any. I've learned that I have to be sort of exploitive about seizing moments to write. Luckily, I still write most of my first drafts by hand, so I often work in bed when I can't sleep.

If you only write for 15 minutes at a time, you can write a book and still have time for Legos.

As a literary device, sugar and pastry carried so many nuances - the sweetness of the past, the danger of overeating and addiction, the political and environmental devastation of plantations - it was just what a book needed.

If you silence yourself, if you try to be good, if you try to be polite, or toe a party line, you end up paying for that in the long run. You pay for it... with your homeland, or with your soul, or with your artistic vision.

Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.

The obsession with food filled my childhood - that's what happens when your parents are from a place or time where people really might starve. In America, my Jordanian father spent decades cooking professionally and pursuing his dream of a restaurant, and it was one of the central ways that he explained himself to his American children. Even though he's a passionate talker, he has a hell of a time with listening. His cooking gave him a way of having a conversation - which was a really interesting thing for a writer to look at.