There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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