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

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.

Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.

In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

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.

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