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

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

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.

I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.

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

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.