In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

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.

The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

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.

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.

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

Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.