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

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

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

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.

In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is a sealed American reality overlaid on top of an infrastructure that is crumbling.

There were illegal poets like Muzaffar al-Nawab, this is the thing - Muzaffar was widely known and he didn't really have books. He would deliver these readings on cassette tape. Go on YouTube and listen to him. He's like a preacher. He's a really interesting figure in modern Iraqi life.

Certain readers will read my book not because they are interested in Iraq, but because they read crime fiction. I did want to get beyond just speaking to other Middle East scholars, so I'm happy about that. But this was, nonetheless, a novel I wish I got to read in Arabic and translate.