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

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

A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. There are no Baathists, no one believes this stuff, this is stuff you read in school because it's assigned to you. Maybe someone believed it, but no one really believes it." And I thought that was really interesting to hear, because the ideology of Baathism was presented so often to Americans as the core of what's wrong.

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.

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

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.