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

Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

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

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

When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

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.

In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.