Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.

Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

The stories that confirm that bigger story are brought in and easily digested. But there's another set of stories that are always there, which do not confirm, but which complicate and contradict what we think we already know. And I'm always attracted to that. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for it. 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.

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.

Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.

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