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.

There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.

Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

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

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.

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.

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.